Somewhere in the Caribbean

 Extracted from Popular magazine, April 7 1923, pp. 1-56. Accompanying headpiece omitted.

A modern romance of the Spanish Main.

Somewhere in the Caribbean

By Francis Lynde

Author of “The Dollar-berry Bush,” “A Transplanted
Tenderfoot,” Etc.

Francis Lynde is a gifted author. One of his especial gifts is the ability to “shift into high,” as it were, from the very start. His readers are never asked to possess their souls in patience while he stokes his fires, gets up steam, and laboriously gathers headway. He invariably leaps away to a running start. But that isn’t all. Having set a killing pace from the crack of the starting gun, Mr. Lynde gathers speed steadily. The interest is not merely sustained to the end. It is increased page by page. How it is done is a secret that only the great writers seem to know. We could not reveal it if we would. All we can say is that Francis Lynde is among the favored few who know the mystic formula. If you want to see the formula being applied at its best, you will find its exemplification in “Somewhere in the Carribean.”

(A Complete Novel)

CHAPTER I.

HOW THE LIGHTS WENT OUT.

YOU may say what you please about the joys of outdoor life in a semi-tropical climate, but I was sweating in the Florida Everglades simply and solely because I had gotten in bad with the Carter Construction Company on a dam-building job in the Colorado mountains and for no climatic reason whatever. Not to make a mystery of the Colorado affair, I may say here that I knew the job was as crooked as a dog's hind leg from start to finish; graft in the pay rolls, graft in the purchasing of material, graft in the estimates; the opportunity for all this lying in the fact that our company had farmed out most of the work to irresponsible subcontractors. Hiram Carter, president of our company—a finer, straighter old citizen never lived—knew nothing about the stealings; he wouldn't, naturally, because he took no part in the active management; but Jeffreys, vice president and chief executive, did. And when the thing blew up, I, as supervising engineer for the responsible company, proved to be the most convenient scapegoat.

Parker Jeffreys didn't come to me himself; he sent his son, Wickham, a young rakehell who was a striking example of what loose money can do toward spoiling reasonably decent stock in the second generation. The interview took place in Denver, whither I had been summoned by a curt wire, and the battleground actual, if you could call it such, was the lobby of the Brown Palace Hotel.

“I guess it's up to you to do the fade-out, Ainsley,” was the way the deputy executioner put it as he was lighting his third cork-tipped cigarette. “The pater doesn't want to institute criminal action and he will have a good excuse not to if you vanish over the horizon. You've known all about this crookedness on the part of the 'subs'—you admit it; and while I don't say you were standing in with them, you know about how a jury would look at it.”

I did; and I knew that I had had verbal instructions—nothing in writing, of course—to keep hands off in the matter of the subcontractors' estimates and material purchases. Also I knew that I was fighting the fiercest battle of my life to keep from making young Jeffreys pay the price of my humiliation right where he sat lounging easily in the lobby armchair and regarding me half indifferently, half cynically through the rising curls of cigarette smoke. He was what an older generation of Westerners called a “dude;” high-priced clothes of a cut a lap or so ahead of the fashion, immaculate linen, patent leathers, socks and tie a color match, not much jewelry but more than any real man would wear.

“This was all cut and dried before you left New York, I suppose?” I said, holding myself in check as best I could.

“About letting you down easy! Naturally. On account of your acquaintance with the Carters. The pater is willing to go even farther. You have had a better offer from somebody else and you've taken it.”

“Oh, I have, have I?” I snapped. “What might it be?”

“A railroad-building job in Peru; firm of English contractors, Finlay, Holmes & Finlay—you ask for 'em in Lima,” he answered casually. “The next sailing from San Francisco will be on the thirteenth. You'll have just time to catch your steamer if you leave Denver to-night.”

The cold-bloodedness of the thing was enough to plant a vengeful devil in a saint. Like the scapegoat of old I was not only to be turned out of the flock; I was to be driven into the wilderness. I knew well enough why Wickham Jeffreys was so willing to stick the knife into me and turn it around in the wound. Hiram Carter and my father had begun life on adjoining farms in Indiana and Alison Carter and I had been children together. In our pinafore days we had solemnly promised to marry—a bit of childish sentiment we had both laughed over many times since. Not that I had been finding it any laughing matter after I grew up and became man enough to realize what a heartbreaking beauty Alison had developed into. But there were no pins left standing in that alley. The year after my graduation from the engineering school, dad had died a disappointed and broken man; and Alison's father was—well, he was now a millionaire two or three times over. Rumor had it that Wickham Jeffreys meant to marry into the company and because Alison and I still exchanged letters once in a while I guessed that in addition to making me the goat in the dam-building steal he thought it offered a good chance to shove me into a good, deep background.

“It is all arranged then?” I inquired, still holding myself down.

He nodded. “You'll find your passage taken when you get to Frisco. We can hold up this investigation until after you've left the country. It seemed the easiest way out of the mess.”

“Suppose I tell you to go to hell and take my chance on the witness stand?” I suggested.

“You won't do anything like that,” he returned coolly. “I don't say that you mightn't make trouble for the Carter Company; perhaps you could, though you'd have nothing but your unsupported word. But you're not going to drag your father's old neighbor into court to refute a charge of conspiracy and graft. What you are going to do is to take the night train for the Coast.”

I may own frankly that I was a murderer in all but the actual fact at the moment when young Jeffreys got out of his chair and stooped to flick the cigarette ashes from his knee with a handkerchief fine enough to have been a woman's. His rising was the signal that the interview was ended. As he walked away toward the elevators, I had another struggle with the man-killing devil inside of me, and it was only the thought that after all there might possibly be some sort of a future with a comeback that restrained me.

This is enough and more than enough of the condition precedent, as the lawyers say. But to wind it up and tuck the end in I may add that I didn't go to Peru or even to San Francisco. There were two night trains leaving Denver at about the same hour; one for the West and another for the Southeast. I took the latter and within a fortnight had landed a job as assistant engineer on a drainage project in the Florida Everglades—in a region where nobody knew me or had ever heard of me; a grave deep enough in all conscience, but not so deep as an exile's in Peru. I was still in America and on the same continent at least with Alison.

It was not until some five months of a mosquito-bitten existence had been worried out in the Florida littoral that I had my first word from the outside world. There were two other assistants on the drainage job with me but since we were running three gangs there was plenty of isolation. Mail came in only once a week and inasmuch as I had written to nobody since leaving Colorado there were no letters for me. But the spell was broken one day when a negro from the lower camp came up with a monogrammed envelope addressed to me, “Somewhere in Florida.” I knew both the monogram and the handwriting. They were Alison's.

In a maze of wonderment as to how she had contrived to trace me, I read her brief note:

Dear Dick: Just on the hopeful chance that this may reach you in time: If you are not too far away can't you manage to come to dinner with us to-night? We are here at Miami in the yacht and I'll see to it that you get enough to eat. I suppose you haven't any dinner coat, but never mind that; come just as you are.

Alison.

P. S. Why haven't you written me in a whole half year?

If the sluggish drainage canal we were cutting through the black, peaty soil had suddenly changed its course to ooze the wrong way I could scarcely have been more astonished. In the first place I hadn't the slightest idea that Alison was in Florida or within a thousand miles of it; and in the second it seemed little less than miraculous that she should have known how to find me. No matter. If she had called me from heaven or hell I think I should have tried to get across to her. In half an hour I had presented myself at the chief's tent two miles down the canal.

“Sure you may go,” was the good-natured permission given after I had asked for overnight leave to go to Miami. “And you needn't cut it to a single night unless you want to. Make it a week-end if you feel like it. Friends from the North?”

“Yes,” I admitted and then adding something about not having much time to waste I hurried away before he should ask other and less easily answered questions.

Alison was right about the dinner coat. I had nothing in my kit remotely resembling one—or the sartorial appurtenances that go with it. But I did have a clean shirt and a change from my working clothes. And the yacht conventions, as I remembered them, were not very rigorous.

As I was borrowing a light rowboat from the dredge equipment, Westcott, our chief, called to me from the canal bank to ask if I didn't want one of the negroes to row me down. If I had accepted his offer things might have turned out differently—though perhaps not. But my lucky—or unlucky—star must have been in the ascendant for I thanked him and said “no” and pulled away, going as straight to my fate as if the painter of the light skiff had been a tow-rope hitched to that same lucky—or unlucky—star.

It was coming on to dusk when I reached Miami by auto from the outlet of the drainage canal and made my way to the bay front. The winter tourist season was on and there were a number of yachts and motor cruisers moored at the landings and others with their riding lights already dis played at anchor in the bay.

Though Alison hadn't mentioned the name of the yacht in her letter I took it for granted that it would be the Waikiki, the seagoing miniature liner upon which her father had lavished the good half of a king's ransom in the building and in which I had once been a guest on a run down the New England coast to Mount Desert. I was not mistaken. The trim little ship, ghostlike in its spotless white paint, was riding at anchor a few hundred yards from the water front and almost at my feet I found her dinghy with a single sailor—a Provincetown Portuguese from his looks—waiting as if for a passenger.

“You are from the Waikiki?” I asked.

“Si, senhor. I wait for wan Meestaire Onslee-e-e.”

It was quite like Alison to send a boat for me; no girl was ever more thoughtful for other people's comfort. So I got aboard, telling the sailor that I was his man; and a few minutes later I had climbed the accommodation ladder to the yacht's deck.

As I hoped she might, Alison herself met me as I set foot on deck, and she was alone.

“Dick!” she exclaimed, giving me both of her hands. “I knew you'd come if the place where you had buried yourself were not more than a thousand miles away! When did you get my letter?”

“A little before noon. It came up in the company launch.”

“And the launch brought you down?”

“No; I came in a skiff—and I've been all afternoon on the job. But never mind about me. Tell me about yourself. Are you feeling as fit as you look?”

This was no empty fill-in on my part. There may have been more beautiful things in a world of beauty than she was, standing there in the softened light of the shaded awning electrics, white-clad in yachting flannels and with a round little white hat devoid of trimmings of any sort crushed down over her masses of red-gold hair—there might have been, I say, but I doubted it. Yet there was a shadow of trouble in the eyes that I used to make her shut and let me kiss when she was four and I was eight.

“Am I well? Physically, yes; so well that it almost hurts. But in another way. Dick, I had to see you and talk with you! There isn't anybody else. We weren't coming here; we were going on. to Havana without stopping. But I insisted. I said I wanted to see how much Miami had grown since we were here two winters ago.”

“You knew I was here or near here?”

“By the merest chance. It was almost a miracle. Wickham said you were in South America; he has always said so. Do you remember, the night you left Denver last summer, you sat in the Pullman smoking room and talked with a nice old gentleman from the East?”

“Not particularly,” I said. “I have talked with a good many men in Pullman smoking rooms, first and last.”

“Well, you did; an elderly man with gray hair and little butlerish side whiskers; a Mr. Carroll from Baltimore. From what you said he gathered that you had been with the Carter Company and were leaving to come down here.”

With these particulars to help, I did remember. The old gentleman had been right fatherly and sympathetic and it had eased my soreness a little to confide in him.

“And with a whole worldful of people to spill it to he had to search you out and tell you?” I marveled.

“It just happened,” she went on hurriedly. “I know his daughter; we were in Wellesley together. And the Carrolls summer on Mount Desert, as daddy and I do. One day we were talking about South America, Mr. Carroll and I, and I said I had a friend there—in Peru—and mentioned your name. He said 'no,' that you were in Florida on a drainage canal near Miami; that you told him you were going there.”

“It's a little world,” I said; the bromidianism slipping out before I could stop it. “I was there and I am here. Are you glad to see me, Allie?”

“Wonderfully glad, Dick—and thankful!”

“Wait a minute,” I interposed; “do you know how I came to leave Colorado?”

“I don't believe a single word of it!” she broke out hotly. “That is one of the things I wanted to talk about; but there are others—much more terrible things. How long can you stay?”

“This evening, you mean?”

“We shall have no chance to talk this evening; there are too many people aboard and—and I think we won't be given a chance to talk. Can you stay over to-morrow and meet me at the hotel?”

“If that is what you want I can't do anything else.”

“You're good, Dick—always good and splendidly reliable. I—daddy and I—need help tremendously and you must tell me what to do. I—there's something awful about to——”

That was the end of it. A Jap steward, appearing as if he had materialized out of the deck at our feet, was whispering in Oriental sibilants, “The honorable dinner is served,” and Alison turned and led the way to the cabin companion stair.

After what she had said I was prepared to meet a goodly number of people in the yacht party. The Waikiki could accommodate any number of guests up to a score or so. But including myself there were only eleven to gather about the dinner table in the white-and-gold saloon; five men and six women. With a single exception they were all strangers to me and in the wholesale introduction I didn't even get the names straight. That was partly because of the exception. Wickham Jeffreys was the one person that I knew and his blank astoundment at seeing me was only equaled by mine at finding him posing as the host of the party in the Carter yacht.

At once I realized that Alison had not only failed to give Jeffreys her true reason for wishing to stop at Miami; she had given him no hint that I was to make one at that night's dinner table. And in some way that I didn't understand, or rather for some reason that was not yet made plain, I could see that my presence was just about as welcome to him as a snowstorm in July would be to a grower of oranges. He had evidently been believing his own story—that I was safely backgrounded against the Peruvian Andes. After the first gasping, “Hah! how are you, Ainsley?” he ignored me completely, striving, as it appeared, to convey the impression to the others that I was Alison's guest and none of his.

In the seating I was placed between a man with a hanging lower lip and bibulous eyes—who answered, as I found, to the name of Matthewson and was a New York stockbroker—between this man and a young woman who began on me by saying, “Rotten of Alison not to let me get your name in the introduction. Mine's Sefton—Peggy for short.” And then out of a clear sky: “An old flame of Alison's, I take it? But you're ages too late. Wick's got the field beaten to a frazzle. Shouldn't wonder if there's a wedding in Havana.”

This calm announcement knocked me speechless. Alison the wife of Wickham Jeffreys? It was simply unthinkable! Was that the trouble she was going to confide to me? If so, it certainly deserved all the adjectives she had used in speaking of it.

After I had found my tongue again and was supplying the missing information as to my name I took occasion to measure the Sefton young woman up with the other members of the party. As nearly as I could determine she seemed to be an average sample. The table talk was all of booze and sport, with a very modern disregard for what our fathers and mothers would have called the common decencies. How on earth Alison came to be in this galley I couldn't imagine. I did not need to remark her downcast eyes and rising color at some of the table stories to assure me she was as much out of her proper element as a snow ball would be in Hades. And yet the 'Waikiki' was her father's yacht.

In a very short time I was given to understand plainly what the southern cruise of the yacht meant to the party as a whole. Its destination was Cuba and its object was to escape the restrictions of prohibition. The men and women of the party were not Alison's friends; they were Wickham Jeffreys'. And they were pointing like trained beagles for a land of free gaming and plentiful liquor. More than once the man Matthewson on my right growled out his impatience at the stopover in Biscayne Bay and the delay it was imposing, and the sentiment found ready echoes on all sides.

The black coffee was served on the after deck under the lighted awning,-and in the shift from the saloon I contrived to shake off the young Sefton person—though she maliciously made it difficult for me to accomplish—and to draw Alison a little aside in the outdoor grouping.

“You are quite paralyzed, I know, and you have a perfect right to be,” she began in a low undertone. “I can't explain now; Wickham will see to it that I don't get the chance. But to-morrow——”

Jeffreys had sauntered across to where we stood at the rail and he looked me over as he might have looked at a horse he was thinking of buying.

“So you came back from Peru, did you, Ainsley?” he said, flipping his cigarette stub overboard.

“No,” I returned shortly. “I didn't go.”

“Ah; that was a mistake, I think. Good people to work for—those Englishmen. What are you doing in Miami?”

I considered it very pointedly none of his business what I was doing but for Alison's sake I couldn't quarrel openly with him on the deck of her father's yacht. So I told him briefly about the drainage canal project. He left us at that, but before we could resume anything like a confidential talk the little Sefton brute came to us and though we saw nothing more of Jeffreys the young woman stuck to us like a leech; was still sticking an hour later when, despairing of getting a moment's privacy with Alison in that environment, I took my leave.

“To-morrow morning at the Royal Palm,” Alison got a chance to whisper, as I was going over the side; and with this as her last word I took my place in the stern sheets of the dinghy.

As a matter of course I was given no slightest warning of what was lying in wait for me. The Portuguese sailor who had been my boatman in pulling off to the Waikiki was officiating again and I paid no attention to him as he bent to his oars and sent the dinghy shoreward. I had enough to think about to render me oblivious to the surroundings, the bay with its fleet of pleasure craft, the water front of the little city with its twinkling electrics. What was Alison Carter's trouble? And how did it come that her father's yacht had been turned over to Wickham Jeffreys and his party of booze fighters and that she was a member of that party? More than all, what foundation, if any, was there for the Sefton girl's prophecy that there would be a wedding in Havana?

It was the blindest of puzzles and one thing only was clear. Alison had known that I was in Florida and that I could probably be reached from Miami. And in her trouble, whatever it might be, she was turning instinctively to me. Good. I'd help her if I could—and to any length; even to the length of pitching Wickham Jeffreys overboard and taking the Waikiki back to New York, if that were what she wished me to do. Our childhood friendship might stand sponsor for that much, at any rate.

At this point in the determinative reverie I came awake to the fact that the dinghy was no longer headed directly shoreward; that it was bumping up against the bilge of a schooner-rigged vessel that seemed to be drifting seaward on the outgoing tide. Before I could ask the Portuguese what he was about, two men flung themselves over the side of the drifting vessel and dropped into the dinghy. In the starlight I saw the bigger of the pair take a limp object like a sausage from his coat pocket and brandish it over my head. The next instant I had a fleeting impression that one of the masts of the drifting ship had fallen over on me and the twinkling shore lights went out in blank darkness.

CHAPTER II.

GOING AND COMING.

When I came to myself it was a bit difficult to patch things together in any sort of connected sequence. My head felt as big as a bushel basket and my tongue was like a dry stick in my mouth. At first I thought I must be stone blind; the most strenuous eye effort revealed no ray of light. Then I realized that I was lying on the rough floor of some windowless den or other; that the floor was rising and falling in rhythmic undulations; and that the sustained rumbling drumming in my ears was not the stamp and go of the engines of the canal dredge to the music of which I had lately been awakening at my camp in the Everglades.

Of course the sequences straightened themselves out in due time; Alison's letter—the long pull down the canal—dinner in the Waikiki—my curiously interrupted attempt to go ashore afterward. What exactly had happened in the dinghy after the two men had dropped into it from the rail of the slowly drifting vessel? Had one of them hit me with the limp-sausage thing he had drawn from his pocket? If so, why? And what and where was this uneasy pit of darkness in which I was lying?

The sense of smell and that of hearing quickly answered the last of these queries. The unmistakable stench of bilge water told me that I was in the hold of a ship, and with the stench there was a whiff of alcohol. Also, the sustained rumbling and steady vibration and the rise and fall of my rough-floor couch said plainly enough that the vessel was a motor craft, or at least an auxiliary, and that it was at sea.

Afterward it occurred to me to wonder why I did not at once hit upon the explanation which would immediately answer all the perplexing queries. The accounting was simple enough if I had only put two and two together. But my buzzing head and half-addled faculties refused to coördinate and I was still trying to flog the mental team into line when I heard voices and clumping footsteps, and a ray of yellow lantern light began to dilute the darkness.

Dissembling a stupor which was really more than half the fact I was presently conscious of the fact that two men were standing over me and that one of them was throwing the lantern light on my face. Through half-opened eyelids I tried to make them out; and did, dimly. They were pretty rough-looking customers—pirates, I should have called them if the time had been a century or so earlier. One was short and thickset, with the expressionless eyes of a pig and a stubbly black beard that seemed nothing more than a shameless neglect of the razor. The other was a giant in stature and build and he reminded me of the pictures of ogres in the children's fairy tales; cropped beard, wide mouth, flaring nostrils, eyes with a smoky look of savagery in them.

“Shammin', d'ye think?” growled the big man, holding the lantern still closer to my face.

“We'll see,” returned pig eyes and with that he planted the toe of his sea boot in my ribs.

That was sufficient. As if the brutal kick had been a tonic to clear away all the brain cobwebs, I leaped up and flung myself upon the kicker. Since they were two to one it was a short battle. At its close the giant had my right arm twisted back in some sort of a jujutsu hold that threatened to dislocate it at the shoulder.

“Oho! Ye'd put up a scrap, would you?” he offered, giving the arm a twist that nearly made me forget my manhood and yell for mercy. “That's all the thanks we get for pullin' ye out o' the pen, is it?”

“For what?” I raged.

“You know well enough for what. It's lucky you've got a good friend or two left that wouldn't see ye disgracin' everybody that belongs to you. All the same, you've got to work your passage on this hooker. You're an ingineer, they're tellin' me. Get along aft and dry-nurse that pusher ingine for a spell. 'Tis long since she's had a granduit ingineer to wait on her.”

I was left no choice as to obedience to the first part of this command. Retaining the twisting hold on my wrist the giant ran me ahead of him through the stinking hold, the short man following with the lantern. Through a bulkhead door I was thrust into the after hold where a heavy-duty motor was thumping away at its task of screw twirling and where the bilge stench was thinned—or thickened—with the reek of gasoline.

“There's your job,” said my captor, giving me a final shove in the direction of the laboring power producer. “You keep that baby turnin' over for what little it's worth. And you'd best keep awake on the job, at that. The gasoline feed has a trick o' jogglin' loose by times and if it springs a leak and sets us afire you'll be the first one to get cooked, d'ye see?”

With no more talk than this the pair left me, climbing a short ladder to disappear through a hatch through which, before it was closed after them, I had a glimpse of the stars. Whatever was to come afterward I was a prisoner for the time being, and if my jailers were not gallows birds of the most unmistakable sort their plumage certainly belied them. Massaging my strained shoulder I sat upon an empty biscuit box and tried to make sure that I was not merely having a bad dream. The two men had left me the lantern—carelessness fairly criminal, I thought, in a gasoline-engine hold with a putatively leaky fuel line—so I was not in total darkness. Gasping in the half-stifling, black-hole atmosphere of the place I tried to pull myself together.

What was this fantastic rigmarole about saving me from the penitentiary? Would the drumming motor, keeping even time to the throbbing pain in my head, help me to hammer out a sensible answer to that question? Like a flash such as might have followed an explosion of the gaseous reek of the engine hold the answer shot itself at me. Five months earlier Wickham Jeffreys, acting for his father but also turning a trick for himself, had tried to get rid of me by shipping me to South America—and thought he had succeeded. Was this another and more primitive attempt to efface me?

Slowly, because my head was still aching like sin, the pieces of the puzzle came together and began to arrange themselves in some sort of order. As I have said, after the brief butt-in upon Alison and me as we stood at the rail of the Waikiki Jeffreys had disappeared, leaving—or sending—Peggy Sefton to take his place as a preventer of confidences. In the hour, more or less, during which I had lingered in the hope of breaking the Sefton combination Jeffreys had had ample time to set a trap for me.

By this time I hadn't much doubt of the nature of the trap and the identity of the trapping vessel. The faint smell of alcohol in the forehold told the story. I had been sandbagged and taken aboard a bootlegging craft, shanghaied in good old-fashioned style; and the vessel was probably now on its way to the Bahamas for a cargo of spirits. Just how Jeffreys had gotten in touch with the bootleggers and had been able to cook up the plot in such a short time still remained something of a mystery, but that was a detail. The plot had worked.

The past thus accounted for, hypothetically at least, the future was the next consideration. What were the bootleggers going to do with me? That they would attempt to hold me as a member of the crew for any considerable length of time was incredible. Besides, it wouldn't be necessary. A day or so would probably measure the length of the Waikiki's stay at Miami and after she sailed she would be lost to me and Jeffreys' purpose would be fully served. But there was small comfort in this conclusion. There was Alison and her still unexplained trouble—Alison as a sort of prisoner, it seemed to me, in the disreputable booze party aboard the Waikiki.

With hot pricklings of helpless rage I pictured Alison's disappointment when she should go to the hotel in Miami and find that I wasn't keeping my promise to meet her there; that I had vanished into thin air. At that moment, if setting the kidnapers' ship on fire would have subserved any good end I felt quite equal to the applying of the match—or the smoking lantern wick.

A little further reflection showed me a still deeper depth of Wickham Jeffreys' suddenly devised plot for getting rid of me. If I hadn't been a criminal in the Colorado instance he had taken pains to make it appear that I was one now. As a member of the crew of a bootlegging craft—and what court would believe that I wasn't a voluntary member?—my status was fixed. If we should be caught I would go to jail with the ogre and the pig-eyed one, who would doubtless swear that I was equally guilty with themselves. Or they might even swear that I was their leader.

Taken as a whole it was a most dispiriting prospect. Escape from a gang of kidnapers on land was one thing but at sea it was quite another. If the vessel, to the chief engineer's post of which I had been so suddenly and forcibly promoted, should go to Nassau for its lading there might be a chance for me. I knew there was a regular boat plying between Miami and Nassau in the season and it was only a night's run across. I had money——

The thought of the money made me feel mechanically in my pockets. My pocket-book was gone and so was my watch. The kidnapers had not only sandbagged me; they had robbed me as well. It was a small matter, I told myself; it was only a half chance spoiled. The probabilities were that the vessel wasn't headed for Nassau; it was more likely that it would pick up its contraband cargo at some one of the unfrequented islands of the group. In which case the half chance to escape would become no chance at all.

Musing sourly over the trap into which I had fallen and more sourly still over the stupid ease with which I had permitted its jaws to close upon me I wore away the painful hours and finally fell asleep to the thumping grind of the motor—did this and came broad awake some time later at the sound of a raucous voice bellowing down at me through the opened hatch at the ladder head.

“Asleep at the switch, are ye?” yelled the voice. “Shut off the power, afore I come down there and cave yer ribs in!”—this with a string of maledictions too profane to repeat. And after I had stopped the motor: “Now then, stand by to take signals, ye damn' scupper lubber!”

There were no bells in the engine hold and the signals were passed by word of mouth from the man at the wheel. Backing and filling by turns the desired position was finally secured and I heard the rasping roar of the chain cable as the descending anchor ran it out through the hawse hole. We were evidently-at our destination,-wherever that might be.

To my relief I was permitted, or rather ordered, to climb out of the hot and stifling machinery den to the deck. The arm-twisting giant who had so maltreated me in the night had not misstated the fact in calling the vessel a “hooker.” Above the water line at least she looked a clumsy enough craft, with the lines and rig of a small coasting schooner. The dawn was just breaking as I scrambled through the hatchway to the deck. The schooner was anchored in a little bay; and the bay as nearly as I could make out was an indentation in the coast of an islet which appeared to be uninhabited.

Amidships two men whose figures I could only dimly distinguish were clewing down the foresail and my two captors were wrestling with the bunched canvas of the mainsail. With an oath the giant ordered me to fall to and help with the clewing and I did it because the time didn't seem to be propitious for inviting another manhandling with the odds of two or possibly four against me.

With the canvas stowed all hands took hold to lift a whaleboat out of its chocks on the roof of the deck house and launch it over the side; and in this operation I got a near-hand view of the two other members of the crew. They were foreigners; Minorcans, as I found out later, and first-class sailormen. How much they knew or cared about the legality of the business in which their vessel was engaged—her name was the Vesta, as I learned by seeing it painted on the bow of the whaleboat—was never made apparent to me. They obeyed orders and asked no questions.

When the whaleboat was launched, Dorgan, the giant, ordered me into it with one of the Minorcans and himself took the steering oar. A short pull sufficed to beach the boat which was hauled up on the sands and left while the three of us, with Dorgan leading the way, plunged into the thicketing of jungle growth which came almost down to the water's edge. What we found in the thicket was what I was fully expecting to see; a liberal cargo of liquor in cases; stacks and tiers of the boxes ready to be transferred to our schooner.

There were no preliminaries to precede the attacking of the big job. With a grunted, “Get into it, you two,” to the sailor and me, Dorgan shouldered one of the cases and led the march back to the stranded whaleboat Morosely enough and with my head still throbbing painfully from the effects of the sandbagging I fell into line as a stevedore. An uninhabited islet, with the Vesta as the only means of escape from it, was not the place for rebellion.

When the whaleboat was loaded so that there was scant room for the sailor and me to man the oars we pulled off to the schooner. In our absence, pig eyes—his name, as I presently learned, was Israel Brill—and the remaining sailor had rigged a sling and a hoist and the cases of contraband were taken aboard and lowered into the hold. Five trips we made before Dorgan gave the word to knock off for breakfast, a rough-and-ready meal of canned stuff served with the low roof of the deck house for a table, and then we went at it again, working alternate shifts and continuing through the better part of the forenoon.

During this period of sweating toil in which Dorgan proved himself a man driver of sorts, nothing further was said to explain my kidnaping. But by this time I was in little doubt as to the true explanation. In my short sojourn in Florida I had heard many tales of the rum runners and the chances they took, but it was not believable that the most desperate of them would resort to shanghai methods to recruit their crews. The reasonable explanation was that Dorgan and Brill had been paid to shanghai me. And if the bribe were large enough they would probably see to it that I stayed shanghaied for as long a time as Jeffreys had bargained for.

From the fact that I speak of these things calmly it must not be supposed that I was taking all this “lying down,” as the phrase goes. On the contrary, long before the final load of liquor cases was ferried across to the Vesta I was so furious that I couldn't see straight. To say nothing of the sandbagging and the brutal manhandling that had followed it the time had now passed when I had promised to meet Alison. She needed me and my promise was broken. Somebody was going to pay; either the giant or his accomplice or Jeffreys—or all three.

But for the present there was nothing to be done. The bare islet offered no chance of escape and without a weapon of some sort I could accomplish nothing in a mêlée with four antagonists; for I made no doubt the Minorcans would side with their masters if it came to blows. Clearly there was nothing for me to do but to bide my time.

With the cargo stowing finished there was another meal of the canned stuff and it was eaten in silence. When he was through, Dorgan motioned me aft—this time I had eaten with the two sailors—and while Brill was stretching himself out in the shade of the bunched mainsail to sleep the big man herded me down into the little den of a cabin.

“Gettin' your bearin's by this time?” he asked, pushing me roughly to a seat on one of the lockers.

“What I am getting is nothing to what you will get when the proper time comes,” I told him wrathfully.

“Still nursin' the big grouch, are you?” he grinned.

“I am still waiting to be told why you shanghaied me.”

“I told you that last night,” he returned, crumbling some leaf tobacco in his hand to fill his cutty pipe." “Don't you want to keep out o' the pen?”

“The man who paid you for kidnaping me is much more likely to land in the penitentiary than I am,” I retorted.

“Well, I'll be damned!” he grunted in mock deprecation; “if that don't beat a hog a-flyin'! Here's your friend a-tryin' his bloomin' hardest to keep you fr'm runnin' your neck into trouble; a-payin' good money to snatch you out o' the jaws o' the devourin' what-you-may-call-it; and you kickin' about it like a bay steer! But it ain't no use. We're aimin' to keep you fr'm wearin' the stripes. Might as well get wise to that first as last.”

At this I looked him straight in the eyes.

“You're not fooling anybody with all this talk about 'friends' and the 'penitentiary,'” I said. “You've been paid to keep me out of the way for a certain length of time and the man who hired you to do it is no friend of mine. All I want to know is this: how long is my board paid for on this hooker?”

“That sort o' depends,” he answered, sucking hard at the pipe which was refusing to draw well. “I ain't hankerin' to sail shipmates with you no longer'n I have to and neither is Isra'l Brill; you're too damn' grouchy. It might be that we could heave you overboard t'-morrah mornin'—with not too far to swim to get onto the mainland—and then, ag'in, it mightn't.”

I knew exactly what that meant. The schooner would be recrossing to the Florida coast with her cargo the following night and if the giant got word that the Waikiki had put to sea from Biscayne Bay I would be free to go. Otherwise I wouldn't.”

“Well, what about it?” he barked when I made no reply.

“There isn't anything about it except that I'll do you and your partner in this business up cold if I get a chance.”

He gave me an exceedingly black look for this and I could see his big teeth bite down upon the stem of his pipe.

“See here, my bucko!” he snarled. “One bad break out o' you and you'll never see Florida ag'in—n'r no other place this side o' hell. There ain't nobody knows how you made your drop-out in the bay last night and there ain't nobody goin' to know. You try to ball things up for us and you'll get the sandbag ag'in and the next time you wake up the fishes'll be gnawin' at you. D'ye get that?”

“I hear what you say.”

“All right. If you want to go on livin' for a spell longer you just let it soak in. Now if you've got any horse sense left you'll turn in and sleep a few lines. Come dark you'll be down in the ingine hold ag'in, a-keepin' that leaky gasoline pipe fr'm bustin' down on us.”

With this the giant heaved himself up and left me, shutting the companion slide as he went on deck. And if I had had any doubt about my status on board it would have been removed by the click of a hasp and a padlock. I was still a prisoner.

A very cursory examination of the little den of a cabin soon convinced me that I couldn't break out of it while there were four men on deck to take the alarm. But as to that, there was nothing to be gained by trying to acquire any larger liberty while the schooner was at anchor in the islet bay. So, stiffly weary from the strenuous toil of the forenoon, I stretched myself upon one of the dirty bunks and almost immediately fell asleep.

It was pitch dark when Dorgan came to turn me out and from the racket on deck I gathered that Brill and the Minorcans were preparing to get the schooner under way. With brittle gruffness the giant ordered me down into the engine hold where the dangerous lantern was already lighted and hung, and I was told to start the motor. As before, Dorgan bellowed the signals down to me and after a short period of maneuvering I was given the order, “Full speed ahead,” and the slow rise and fall of the vessel told me that we were once more at sea.

More merciful or less careful than he had been the night before Dorgan left the hatch at the ladder head open. Though the night was warm there was a good breeze and the schooner, as I soon made out, was running close hauled. By consequence the big mainsail served as a wind vane to send a cooling breath now and then into the engine-heated den. After we had been running for perhaps a half hour one of the Minorcan sailors passed my supper down to me in a pannikin and later handed in a can of black coffee hot from the galley.

That was the beginning of a long night during which I alternately dozed on the cracker-box seat and started awake to examine the dangerous gasoline pipe. Nothing occurred to break the monotony. The weather held good and save for the ground swell the sea was as calm as a mill pond. Out of the last of the dozing periods I was aroused by Dorgan who had descended the ladder far enough to enable him to kick me awake. “Look alive and get onto your job!” he ordered snappishly and a little later he bawled down to me to shut off the motor.

With the power off the silence was almost deafening. From the lapping of the waves along the schooner's side I knew we were still making way slowly under sail; but presently the creaking of blocks and the rattle of the leach rings on the masts gave notice that we were heaving to.

For possibly half an hour, during which time the schooner swung gently to the swell and made no headway, nothing happened. Then a muffled stuttering announced the approach of a motor boat and a low-voiced hail was exchanged. This promised a chance to learn something of our whereabouts and I crept up the ladder as far as I dared with out showing my head above the coaming of the hatchway.

As nearly as I could judge the motor boat was lying to under the Vesta's quarter. At all events I was able to hear quite distinctly most of what was said. It was the newcomer who began.

“The jig's up,” was the word that came over the side. “They've piped you off and the cutter's down from Fernandina lookin' for you. We saw her searchlight off the inlet less than half an hour ago.”

“How do you know they're lookin' for us?” Dorgan asked.

“Got it straight by the underground. How much you got aboard?”

“Just about all she'll hold.”

“That settles it, then. Take half a night and more to run it ashore and if you're here at daybreak the cutter'll get a wireless and be down on us.”

Following this there was a low-toned argument of which I could catch only the drift. It seemed that the rum runners had an alternative landing place and the man in the motor boat was urging the necessity of using it in the present instance. For a time Dorgan was obstinate. The other place had its risks, the chief of which was that to reach it a steamer lane would have to be traversed, and in daylight. If the Vesta were known and suspected she would be certain to be seen and identified.

The conclusion of the argument came when a beam of light, plainly visible from my perch at the ladder head, swept like a giant finger through the sky overhead. The talk at the schooner's rail stopped as if the light beam had suddenly paralyzed the tongues that were making it. Then somebody swore feelingly—Brill, I think it was—and barked out a command to the crew of two as he sprang for the schooner's wheel.

I had no more than time to drop to the floor of the engine hold before Dorgan was yelling down to me to start the motor and at the same moment I heard the motor boat backing away. Since flight would mean a prolonging of my captivity I made delay as I could, half minded to dart up the ladder and try my luck at reaching the departing messenger boat before it should get out of reach. There was a light land breeze blowing and I could hear Brill cursing the Minorcans for their slowness in making sail.

While I hesitated, with my hands on the engine flywheel to turn it over, Dorgan swung down the ladder into the lantern-lighted pit vomiting profanity. Probably it was only the instinct of self-preservation that made me snatch up a wrench and back away to the port side of the motor. But the brandished wrench did not stop the giant.

“Damn your eyes! You'd double cross us, would you?” he bellowed and with that he came for me, all claws to clutch and huge hairy arms to grapple and crush.

CHAPTER III.

THE WHITE SHIP.

As Dorgan came for me I realized that I had chosen the worst possible place for a try-out battle with a man who outclassed me as much as he did. Though at that time I tipped the scale at a husky hundred and seventy pounds and was as fit as a hard working outdoor life could make me I knew that nothing but cleverness and skill could avail me in a fight with a man who certainly outweighed me by forty or fifty pounds and whose brute strength was commensurate with his size. And when in addition to that he had me cramped for room, I saw myself beaten before the battle was begun. For not even a past master of prize-ring footwork could have done anything in that cluttered engine hold.

As luck would have it I got in only one blow with the caught-up wrench and that one Dorgan took on a warding arm. Before I could swing at him again he had closed with me across the motor with his huge hands gripping my throat and if he could have kept his hold I should have been a dead man in the few seconds or minutes that one may live in a garroting clutch that shuts off both breath and blood.

But fortunately for me the engine was between us and its cylinders were still so hot from the long drive we had made that they burned whatever they touched. It was the discovery that they would burn that saved me. Clawing and struggling to break the strangle hold I happened to get a knee against the hot cylinders and in all the agony of starting eyeballs and bursting lungs I was still able to catch at the straw of advantage.

With a foot braced against the motor I pulled the giant over upon the hot machinery. He stood it for a second or so and then let go with a bellowing oath. This gave me a chance for a bit of short-arm work but the choking had left me half paralyzed and the blows which should have purchased me a brief breathing space were little more than feeble gestures—there was no punch in them. In a flash he had clutched me again but this time I contrived to dodge the strangle hold and, locked in a mad grapple that neither dared to break, we swayed back and forth over the hot engine, each trying to drag the other down upon the scorching barrier.

In such an awkward wrestling match the lighter man was naturally bound to get the worst of it. Shifting his grip in spite of all I could do to pinion his arms Dorgan finally got the body squeeze he wanted and crushed me until I made sure I could hear my ribs, crack—until the lantern-lit den turned first blood red and then black for me. And when I came to I was lying on the floor and Dorgan was starting the motor.

I watched him adjusting spark and throttle, expecting nothing but that he would pick up the dropped wrench and brain me with it when he was ready. But he didn't. After he had the motor running to please him—and that was at its thumping best—he climbed the ladder and clapped on the hatch, having paid mo more attention to me than if I had been a dog which he had first choked and then kicked aside out of his way.

This appeared to be the end of things, for the time being at least. The schooner was evidently running away; down the coast to the southward, I judged, since the breeze had come quartering from the land and the slant of the vessel proved that she was on the starboard tack. And she seemed to be making capital speed; much better than her above-water lines would lead one to expect of her. I could hear the water racing under her counter and the dip to lee ward showed that the breeze was freshening.

Painfully I crawled to the cracker-box seat and pulled myself up on it, groping tenderly with investigative fingers to try to determine if Dorgan had broken any ribs in that last life-extinguishing bear hug. He hadn't. Though I was as sore as if I had been beaten with flails I was still whole as to bones. Dorgan was too much for me in a rough-and-tumble, as he had amply proved; yet in all the keen humiliation of the moment I was burning with a fierce desire to get at him in the open, under conditions where the inequality in bulk and weight would not give him such a terrific advantage.

Perhaps this is as good a place as any to say that I come of Scottish stock, as my father-name would imply. That blood, as all the world knows, is slow to anger; but not easily satisfied with its beatings. Crouching there upon the box seat, with every drawn breath a dagger to stab me, it was not strange that I lost sight of everything but a mad determination to wreak vengeance upon the two scoundrels who for a bribe had robbed me of liberty and were making me a football to be kicked hither and yon at their pleasure. Then and there I began to plan to get square in some fashion that would count.

For a weary time, while I studied and plotted, the schooner held on without shifting a sail or starting a sheet, and from her yawing and heeling and the occasional kicking of the lightly buried propeller out of water it was apparent that the breeze had grown still fresher and was rising to a half gale. I could only guess that we were making rapid southing. Unless the direction of the wind had changed, which seemed unlikely, the Vesta could hardly be headed otherwhere than down the Florida coast.

Having no means of knowing at what point the news-bearing motor boat had reached us I could form no idea of the schooner's position from hour to hour, but that was a small matter. In any event I had lost all hope of getting in touch again with the Waikiki and Alison. Doubtless the yacht was by this time well on its way to Havana; with Alison reproachfully concluding that I had failed her in whatever extremity she was facing. All of which made me plot the harder; and perhaps it was the thought centering upon that remark Of Peggy Sefton's—that she wouldn't wonder if there would be a wedding in Havana—that finally made me strike hands with a plan as mad as any vaporing of the unbalanced. But of that, more in its place.

In due time the remainder of the night wore away and in spite of the aches and pains and other untoward hamperings I got some sleep. When the engine-hold hatch was finally opened again I saw that a new day had come and that the sun was shining. It was Dorgan's ogreish face that looked at me through the square of daylight and his greeting was an oath followed by a command to come up and take my turn at the cook's galley for breakfast.

Stiff and sore, I climbed the steep ladder and stepped out on deck. The first few breaths of good clean fresh air after such a long confinement in the stifling hold nearly knocked me over, but the reviving reaction came quickly and I looked around to take in the new situation. The half gale of the night had subsided to a fair sailing wind and the Vesta was still on the starboard tack, headed west by south, as I guessed from the position of the sun, and with a goodly spread of canvas drawing. There was no land in sight but off the port bow I saw the smoke of a distant steamer, apparently westbound, as we were.

Far astern there was another smoke and now I understood what Dorgan had said to the news bearer in the motor boat; that in the dodging run the other was urging the schooner would be in a frequented steamer lane. That lane could be no other than the strait running between Florida—or the Florida Keys—and Cuba. What was the new destination toward which the Vesta was heading? I only knew that it couldn't be Cuba or any of the islands. The United States was the only country in which the liquor cargo could be unloaded at a profit.

Coming to matters nearer at hand I saw that Brill was at the schooner's wheel and that he was getting the last life of speed out of the straining canvas. Dorgan stood at the after rail with a pair of binoculars and a glance showed that he was trying to make out the following vessel whose smoke was blowing in a long plume to leeward. Forward, squatting on deck with their backs against the starboard bulwark, were the two Minorcans. One of them was smoking and the other seemed to be asleep.

In the cook's galley I found some remains of breakfast, and these, with a can of coffee, hot, thick and black, went some distance toward making up for the effects of the manhandling I had taken in the night. While I was eating Dorgan came and looked in on me scowling, and I saw that one of his hands was bandaged with a dirty rag; evidence that I had contrived to mark him in the tussle across the hot motor.

“Think you got enough of it last night to do you for a while?” he demanded with an ugly leer.

“It will answer for the present. But I'll take you on again when I can have decent footing and a little more room,” I said.

“Oho—you will, will you? Well, lemme tell you; the next time I'm goin' to twist the damn' neck off you! Get that?”

“If you are man enough,” I thrust in. Then: “When are you going to put me ashore?”

“When we get damn' good and ready. And that won't be to-day n'r t'-morrah.”

“Where are we now?” I inquired, having no idea he would tell me. But he did, crabbedly.

“In the straits. Come night we'll be off Key West if the wind holds.” And with that he went aft again.

Now my work on the drainage canal had made me fairly familiar with the geography of the Florida peninsula. If we were going to be off Key West at nightfall it meant that we were to make our landing somewhere on the western or Gulf side of the peninsula. Thoughtfully I passed the possible landing places in mental review. Of course a town wasn't necessary for the bootlegging purpose but a road over which trucks could be driven was; and I knew of no practicable road south of Punta Rossa at the mouth of the Caloosahatchee River, a few miles below Fort Myers. This was a full hundred miles up the coast from the Keys or possibly a hundred and fifty as the crow flies from Key West.

At the shortest this would mean two or three days more of the floating prison for me; or even a longer time if the wind should remain in its present quarter and the schooner had to beat up the Gulf from Key West. At the prospect the desperate plan I had formulated in the bad hours of the night came up for a calm daylight weighing and measuring. Under favoring conditions the beginning of it at least seemed feasible. But I couldn't see through to the end of it. That part would be on the knees of the high gods.

Tobacco hunger, denied now for some thirty-six hours, accounted for my next outreaching. Since I couldn't or wouldn't beg Dorgan or Brill for a smoke I strolled forward to where the two sailors were crouched under the weather bulwark.

“Either of you fellows speak English?” I asked.

“Me, I spik leetle bit,” replied the one with a pipe.

“I'm about dead for a smoke,” I said. “Does that mean anything to you?”

Ginning good-naturedly he fished in his pocket and brought out another pipe and a sack of tobacco.

“I smoke—you smoke,” he said, passing me the necessaries; whereupon I squatted beside him and filled and lighted.

For a time I held my peace. I could see Dorgan watching us furtively and I didn't want to give him an excuse to come and drive me aft. Taking a moment when he was again training the glass upon the steamer astern I ventured a question.

“Do you and your partner like this ship?”

The pipe lender shrugged. “No ver' mooch; too many damn-damn.”

“I don't like it very much, either,” I agreed.

“You been—how you say eet?—shanghai? What for? You no sailormans.”

“Money,” I said shortly. “Somebody paid them.”

Dorgan had marked me down and was striding forward.

“Get the hell out o' here!” he growled when he came up. “Get back in your hole and look out for that gasoline pipe.”

The temptation to try it out with him again was pretty strong as I scrambled to my feet but the prudent Scottish blood got in its word in time. Though I knew that Brill couldn't leave the wheel to chime in I wasn't sure of the Minorcans as yet. So I returned the borrowed pipe and followed the big man aft, dropping into the engine hold when I came to its hatchway, but not before I had taken another look at the sternward steamer which was slowly overhauling us.

That look sent me below with the blood jumping in my veins. Though the overhauling ship was still too far away for identification, even with a glass, there was one thing that could be seen quite plainly. It was painted white!

Naturally, of course, I jumped immediately to the conclusion that it was the Waikiki and that was what started the grateful circulation and made me forget my aches and pains in a fine frenzy of excitement. Then all at once I remembered that the steamers of the Fruit Line were also painted white and the excitement died down. Still, there was a bare chance, and after I had tightened up the leaky gasoline connection and had killed time enough to make the sweltering heat of the engine hold a plausible excuse for escaping from it I climbed the ladder and swung myself up to sit on the edge of the hatchway. A quick glance over the stern showed me the white steam vessel apparently in about the same relative position, still too far away for identification.

When I had gone below at Dorgan's command Brill was at the schooner's wheel; but now one of the Minorcans—my pipe lender—had it and neither Dorgan nor Brill was to be seen. I supposed they were down in the little box cabin of the hooker and I wondered a little at the fact that they should both leave the deck at the same time. The deck-house companion slide was open and I could hear a murmur of voices. With a nod to the friendly little foreigner at the wheel I crept forward.

As the murmur of voices had assured me, the two rum runners were in the cabin, and when I broke in as a listener they were talking about me. Pruned of the thickly interlarding profanity, this is what I heard.

“I told you, night afore last when you made that dicker with the bloke fr'm the yacht, that we'd ort to stick to our own knittin'”—this from Brill. “This here kidnapin' side line's goin' to get us into a hell's mess o' trouble afore we're through with it. How do we know who this chap is or what sort of a rumpus we've kicked up by runnin' off with him?”

“Meanin' that the other bird lied to us?” said Dorgan.

“Sure he lied. Anybody can see with half an eye that this feller we've crimped ain't no prison dodger.”

“Well, what if he ain't? Haven't we got the money?”

“That's all right. But there's more a-comin'. You take it fr'm me, this chap ain't fallin' for all this as easy as it looks. I don't like the cut of his jib. I believe if he thought it would get him anywhere he'd scrap both of us in a holy minute.”

“Huh!” Dorgan sneered; “you've got cold feet, Isra'l—that's all that's the matter with you. Ain't I tellin' you I got his goat last night?”

“Maybe you did and then ag'in maybe you didn't. Then you had to make it worse by nobbin' his watch and money,” Brill fumed discontentedly. “You listen to what I'm sayin'. The minute we put him ashore there's goin' to be hell to pay. If he don't make us lose our divvy on this cargo it'll be because we don't give him a chance.”

There was silence for a little time and then Dorgan broke it.

“Maybe you're right, after all. We ain't had to pull any graveyard stuff in this game yet but I reckon there's got to be a first time for everything. He'll do it himself if we give him the right office. He's dead crazy to get ashore. It's my notion that there's a heap more to this shanghai business than what floated to the top o' things night afore last.”

“Well, what's the play?” Brill asked.

“Short and sweet. Along about dark we can beat up to'ard the keys and show him the land close to—short swim, we'll say. He'll fall for it and go overboard in a hurry. All he wants is a chance. And after he jumps in, the straits current'll do the rest.”

“But what if he don't jump?”

I heard Dorgan give his snarling chuckle.

“If he shies you can stub your toe agin' something and stumble over onto him, carelesslike.”

I could hear Brill draw his breath with a sound that was almost as shrill as a whistle.

“Me?” he gulped.

“Yes, you, Isra'l; you're used to bumpin' folks off—or leastwise to scuttlin' ships under 'em; and you're the one that's scared to hang onto him till we take port.”

After this there was another interval of silence and it was thick enough to be cut with a knife. It gave me a chance to grasp the full meaning of what I had heard. These two kidnapers were coolly planning to drown me!—that is, if I should refuse to drown myself. It was one of those things that couldn't be believed and yet had to be believed. And the motive was so callously inadequate. At the worst the most they had to fear from me was that I might talk after I got ashore and so put a crimp in their liquor smuggling.

While the schooner heeled to the drag of her canvas and the wind sang in the cordage I listened again, ready to retreat if I should hear them stirring to come on deck. But there was no sound save the crackle of a match as one of them lighted his pipe. Finally Brill spoke again.

“Didn't make out that smoke boat that's comin' up astern, did you?”

“Not yet,” Dorgan grunted. “She looks like one o' the Fruiters.”

“Not to me,” Brill countered. “Not enough top works. I don't like the way she's hangin' onto us.”

Dorgan swore morosely.

“Hell! You've got a streak o' the yellow a mile long! S'posin' she's anything you please; s'posin' she a revenue cutter—which she ain't. Can't nobody touch us till we get within the three-mile. There ain't nothin' to you, Isra'l, but a little bit of the know-how about handlin' a windjammer. You'd jump out o' your skin if you was to hear a mouse gnawin'!”

I drew a breath of relief. This was comforting, as far as it went. It assured me that I had at least one truckling coward to deal with. It also told me something else; that while Dorgan was the captain and leader, Brill was the one who knew what little either needed to know about navigating the schooner. The obstacles were clearing away for me, a little at a time. After a bit I heard Brill again.

“I'm nigh about dead for sleep; I reckon that's what makes me so jumpy. S'pose you could keep her from broachin' to while I turn in for a spell? West and by south's the course.”

“Sure I can!” said the giant; and knowing that this was my signal to retreat I edged away from the companion slide and was sitting in the open engine-hold hatchway again when Dorgan made his appearance on deck.

As I expected he would, the bully came straight for me.

“Didn't I tell you to get down in that hold and stay there?” he roared.

“It's too hot down there,” I retorted.

“You'll find it a heap hotter in hell,” he flung back at me as he went on to check the schooner's course with a stare into the binnacle. Evidently the little Minorcan at the wheel was not steering fine enough, for Dorgan broke out in a blast of profanity and struck him a blow in the chest that would have knocked him down but for his hold on the spokes of the wheel. The somber-faced little man took the blow without a murmur but I saw his dark eyes blaze with suppressed rage as Dorgan went to the after rail and once more focused his glass upon the following steamer.

The giant's prolonged scrutiny of the overtaking vessel gave me leave to do the same. One of the things field engineering does for a man is to train his eyes to long distance sight and it is quite likely that I saw as much with my naked eyes as Dorgan did with his glass. The steamship was creeping up on us gradually but it was apparent that she was proceeding only at loafing speed. As her course lay she was headed to pass us to leeward at a distance of perhaps half a mile. But at the rate she was steaming I thought some considerable time would elapse before we should have her abeam of us.

With Israel Brill's remark about her top works to prompt me I studied her as well as I could, shading my eyes from the glare of the sun upon the water. It was plain that she was not a passenger ship of any type that I was familiar with; she was too low in the water and as Brill had said there was a total absence of top works such as a modern passenger ship carries. Also, if the distance wasn't deceiving me, I thought she was too small to be a liner.

It is odd that the truth didn't occur to me at this time, but it didn't. While I was still straining my eyes to get a better view of the white boat a smell of raw gasoline came up through the open hatchway in which I was sitting and I swung down to find that the leak had started again and was this time beyond curing by any temporary tinkering. That being the case and the safety of the schooner being an essential part of my double-headed plan for vengeance and escape I set to work to make the needed repair in a workmanlike manner and was so long about it that the next time I climbed to the ladder head the noonday sun was blazing pretty nearly overhead and the short-sleeved undershirt which was the only body garment I had kept on while working in the hot hold was more than I needed.

Coming so suddenly out of the gloomy underdepths into the glaring sunshine it was perhaps half a minute before I could wink the dazzling blindness out of my eyes. Blurringly I saw that the smaller of the two Minorcans was still at the wheel and that Dorgan was pacing a slow sentry go up and down the weather side of the deck.

As the perspective cleared I looked astern to find the white steamship. It had disappeared as completely as if the sea had swallowed it. For a moment I did not understand what had happened. Then I crouched to look to leeward under the boom of the half-winged mainsail. As the schooner lifted on a swell the vista to port and forward widened and I had a nerve-tingling shock that nearly made me lose my hold upon the hatchway coaming and tumble into the hold. At a distance that I judged to be something less than a half mile, and steaming slowly on her course, was the white vessel with the curious lack of top hamper. The one chance in a thousand had tipped the beam. She was the Carter yacht—the Waikiki!

I knew then that my time was upon me—and it had come some hours too soon. Briefly, the plot I had so laboriously concocted during the waking hours of the night, and had perfected later, after Dorgan had told me where the schooner was and where she was going to be, was this: with the coming of darkness I would watch for my chance of slipping into the deck-house cabin while both of the bullies were on deck and rummage for arms, which I made no doubt I should find on board of a vessel given over to the risky business of liquor smuggling. With a pistol or a rifle I could and would bring Dorgan and Brill to terms. Since the schooner would then be off Key West it would by the same token be off Havana where, as I had prefigured, the Waikiki would already be berthed. And when I had gotten the whip hand of them I meant to make my captors change their course and land me at the Cuban city—to force them to do it at the point of a gun.

But the sight of the Waikiki steaming along almost within hailing distance fired a train of determination that blew the more prudent plan to shards. Alison, in trouble and depending—or so she had said—upon me, was in that near-by ship. And there, if the might of a single pair of hands could bring it to pass, I should presently be, too, and that before the slipping chance should escape.

Taking it for granted that Brill was still asleep in the cabin I stole a look at the steersman. What I meant to do would be done only if he failed to give the alarm, since he was facing me and could mark every move I should make. A hand waved at him when Dorgan's back was turned brought a nod and a smile. That was enough. Anxiously I watched the giant, expecting to see him turn at the forward end of the deck house and come pacing aft again. But he did not. Instead he kept on going forward, stopping only when he reached the foremast from which point he could stare across at the Waikiki under the after leach of the schooner's bellying staysail.

This was my chance and I caught at it. The companion slide was open and the padlock was hanging in its hasp. Bounding up I closed the slide noiselessly and snapped the lock. That disposed of Brill for the time being. With a quick glance back at the little steersman—a glance that assured me that I had nothing to fear from him—I crouched under the lee of the deck house and waited for Dorgan to come aft.

CHAPTER IV.

A STERN CHASE.

As the event proved I hadn't long to wait. After he had stared a minute or so at the white yacht Morgan came tramping aft again. Oddly enough, as I thought, he did not see me, though he might have easily if he had looked across to where I was crouching at the corner of the deck house as he passed on the weather side. And neither, it appeared, did he notice that the companion slide was closed.

I let him get well beyond the line of the binnacle and the wheel before I ran across to take a stand near the weather rail, having no mind to give him the advantage of the inclination of the deck as the schooner heeled to leeward. Now that I was inviting the unequal battle I would have given much for a weapon of some sort, any sort, and would have thought it no disgrace to use it against such a man mountain as the huge liquor smuggler. But there was nothing save the belaying pins in their racks on either rail and they were too far aft to be reached in time.

For the time was mighty short. I had scarcely found my footing before the giant turned and saw me; saw too that I was waiting for him, I guess, for he charged like a mad bull, hugging the rail so that if I should dodge I'd be forced to give him the slant of the deck. I did give it to him as he closed in but only to duck under his outstretched arms and come up behind him, handing him a right and left in the short ribs as I passed. With a volley of oaths and with an alertness surprising in such a hulk of a man he spun around to face me again and again tried to rush me. But now I had more room to maneuver in and merely slipped aside, getting under his guard a second time with a couple of the short-arm body jabs. And with that the battle, the real battle, was on in deadly earnest.

Without being in any enthusiastic sense a sport fan in college I had been sufficiently interested in athletics to go in moderately for wrestling and boxing and in my senior year the college had been blessed with an under coach who knew ring fighting from the bottom up and was willing to impart his knowledge to any of the men who cared to stand up to him on the chalked canvas. From this shrewd and hard-hitting mentor I had learned two things above all others; one was never to let it come to a clinch with a bigger man and the other to seek to match overpowering weight with cleverness and agility.

A hot little flurry of give and take showed me that Dorgan had no “science;” no knowledge of the boxing game on its skillful side. His tremendous bulk and strength were his chief stock in trade. He knew very well that if he could once get his hands on me it would be all over but the bone cracking; but so did I. So I contented myself with playing him like a hooked fish, giving ground when he rushed, getting in a blow when I could and slipping away before he could recover. The chief disadvantages were the slant of the deck and the contracted space between the obstructing deck house and the binnacle stand and the wheel. If he should succeed in cornering me I knew I was gone.

In the warm work of the next two or three minutes I had half a dozen narrow escapes from the cornering. I soon found that I could hit him when and where I chose but I couldn't stop his bull-like rushes. When he got his enormous weight in motion nothing short of a stone wall would have stopped it. Under such conditions the fight speedily developed into a battle of endurance. Around and about in the narrow ring of the schooner's after deck it surged and shifted. Twice the big brute got a hamlike hand on my shoulder but the flimsy undershirt gave him no hold and both times the failure to force a clinch gave me a chance to hammer him viciously while his guard was down.

As any one who has ever put on the gloves will know, a round in which the fighting is pressed to the limit cannot last indefinitely without a breathing space. When the fight began, I thought or hoped that I could outlast him if I saved myself all I could and let him work hard enough. But his furious rushes kept on endlessly and he was still making them after my breath was coming in heartbreaking gasps and my foot work was beginning to grow uncertain. Once and once again I slipped just as he was crowding me against the lee rail and a moment later I escaped only by leaping backward over the corner of the deck house. Breathlessly I knew it must come to a decision before long and in the feinting and dodging I battered away desperately, breaking over and under the guard which he was now scarcely making any effort to maintain.

Through all this frenzied mêlée the Minorcan at the wheel had kept his place unmoved and his shipmate forward had come aft only far enough to get a near hand view of what was going on. But now I saw out of the corner of my eye that this second man was closing in and I caught a flash of the sun upon bright steel. The fellow had his knife out. Was he going to use it upon me or upon Dorgan? Above the volcanic eruption of curses that Dorgan was pouring out I heard the shrill voice of the man at the wheel answering my unworded question: “No se moleste, señor! Pedro will cut ze hear-rt out of heem!”

That put an entirely new face upon things. I didn't care to be a party to a butchery, even of so hardened a brute as the big bootlegger. Waving the knife man back I let Dorgan push me aft past the wheel and so out of the only space big enough to afford room to play in. The bully, thinking he had me cornered at last, gave a yell of triumph and closed in. But his triumph was short lived. As he grabbed me and I could feel his hot breath upon my face I snatched one of the iron pipe belaying pins from its rack; a weapon I had been coveting from the beginning of the fight but which had hitherto been out of reach. That settled it. The first swinging blow crippled his guarding arm, and the next crashing down upon his unprotected head laid him out.

By this time, of course, Brill was awake and up and battering at the locked companion slide but I let him batter while I leaned against the rail and got my breath. When I had enough of it to enable me to talk I turned to the sailor at the wheel.

“I'm captain of this ship now!” I panted. “Are you and your partner with me?”

“Si, señor,” he replied just as calmly as that; and then he added: “Too mooch damn-damn.”

“All right. You see that ship out ahead: You steer so as to catch her if you can. Do you understand?”

“Si, señor.”

Beckoning the other man, who apparently had no English, to come and help me I knelt beside Dorgan to find out whether or not I had killed him outright. He wasn't dead—for which I was duly thankful—but he was out of the fight permanently. The two bones of his left forearm were broken and while the second blow with the iron belaying pin hadn't quite cracked his skull, so far as I could determine in a hasty examination, there was little doubt that it would be some time before the wound would give him leave to ask what had happened to him.

I suppose it would have been only humane to have attended to the enemy's hurts before doing anything else; but Brill was still hammering at the companion slide and it seemed the part of prudence to bring the little war to a definite conclusion without any more loss of time. The Waikiki was gradually increasing her lead and if we were to overtake her, Brill, who was now the only man aboard of us who knew what the schooner could be made to do, must be persuaded to take his trick at the wheel.

Catching up the trusty belaying pin I stood aside and motioned to Pedro to open the slide. When he did so the fat-faced skipper popped up like a jack-in-the-box with a revolver in each hand, sweat streaming, and his red hair on end, not so much from belligerence, I thought, as from fright. When he saw Dorgan, bloody-headed and apparently dead, lying on the deck at his feet he pulled both triggers wildly, hitting nothing, of course, but the circumambient air. There were two of us to seize and disarm him and we did it promptly.

“Wot in 'ell's all this?” he yelped when we had him covered with his own weapons.

“Mutiny on the high seas,” I told him shortly. “I'm in command of this hooker now and if there is to be any drowning match pulled off, as you and Dorgan planned a few hours ago, you're the one who will go over the side—not I.”

That fetched him. “You—you'd murder me?” he wheezed cravenly.

“Just as certainly as you would have murdered me. Only you've got it coming to you and I haven't.”

At that I was given to see that my estimate of his courage, or rather of his lack of it, was fully justified. Before I knew what he was about he had fallen on his marrow bones and was begging like a dog. Life, life upon any terms was all he craved and his ravings were so mixed up with bubbling oaths as to be almost farcial.

“Get up!” I ordered. “You make me sick! Your partner did have sand enough to stand up to it until he was knocked out, but you haven't the nerve of a jellyfish! You say you want to live: you've got just one chance for it. If you can make this windjammer catch up with that yacht out ahead and put me aboard of her, you live. Otherwise you walk the plank in good old pirate style!”

He caught at the condition like a drowning man catching at a flung life line.

“I—I'll put you aboard of that smoke boat or sail the masts out o' this hooker,” he gasped stumbling aft to take the wheel. Then he burst out in a torrent of profanity at the two sailors, the imprecations being the embroidery of an order to set the gaff topsails. But I stopped that in a hurry—the cursing, I mean.

“Cut that out—cut it all out!” I said. “You forget that these men are no longer your serfs; they're your masters.” Then to the two Minorcans: “Do what he tells you to but kick him if he swears at you.”

While the two sailors were setting the topsails I slit the sleeve on Dorgan's broken arm and examined the fracture, keeping an eye on Brill meanwhile and also keeping one of the captured pistols within easy reach. As nearly as I could tell by feeling, the arm fracture was simple; the bones were not splintered. My experience as a boss in various construction camps remote from civilization had given me some knowledge of rough-and-ready surgery so I proceeded to set the bones as well as I could, whittling splints of kindling wood from the galley with Dorgan's own clasp knife and cutting up a piece of sailcloth for bandages. For the scalp wound I could do nothing better than to wash it with sea water; since Brill at my questioning said that the schooner carried no medicine chest, not even a bottle of iodine.

While I was working over the fallen giant the topsails were hoisted and the schooner, heeling to their draft, began to forge ahead at a gratifying increase of speed. During the fight and its mopping-up aftermath the Waikiki had increased her lead to possibly a mile. Now that I had time in which to weigh and measure the probabilities I wondered if by any unlucky chance Jeffreys had recognized the Vesta in passing. If he had, any attempt we might make to overtake the yacht was foredoomed to failure.

I knew from having sailed in her that the Waikiki could leave us as the bullet leaves the gun if she were put to speed. But after I had done what I could for Dorgan, and went to focus the binocular upon the vessel ahead, I was confident that as yet no full-speed order had been sent down to her engine room. She was still loafing easily over the long swells and with the glass, which was a good one, I could make out the figures of the people on her after-deck lounge though of course I could not recognize them.

As soon as the Minorcans were free to help me, we three got Dorgan down into the cabin and spread him out in one of the bunks; not however until I had first made sure of Israel Brill by anchoring him to the wheel standard with a lashing of ropeyarn around his legs. Having disposed of Dorgan, I left Brill tied while I took an inventory of the capture, overhauling the galley stores to see what we had in the way of provisions and sounding the gasoline tank to find out how we were supplied in the matter of engine fuel. In both respects the schooner was fairly well found. There was food enough in tins to last us a week or more and the gas tank, which was a large one, was still more than half full.

Next I made another trip to the cabin and rummaged for arms, making no doubt that a rum smuggler would carry something more than the pair of rusty army revolvers we had taken from Brill. The guess was confirmed. In one of the lockers I found four service rifles and another pair of army pistols, with a box of ammunition. To be on the safe side I removed this arsenal from its place in the locker, carrying it forward into the main hold and hiding it among the liquor cases.

Going on deck again I took another look at the yacht with the glass. Though, to my landsman's eye, the added topsails had increased our speed fully one half, the relative positions of the two vessels seemed unchanged. As nearly as I could judge we hadn't gained a foot in the race; this, too, with the wind coming still fresher than be fore out of the northeast. Turning upon Brill I asked him if he didn't have some more canvas that he could put upon the schooner.

“More sail?” he gurgled. “Wot in 'ell's the matter with you? She's got every stitch she can stagger under right now! If we'd get a capful more o' this wind she'd go on her beam ends as sure as the devil's a hog!” Then, in shrill terror: “Have a heart, man, and take these here lashin's off my feet! If she was to go over I'd be drowned like a rat in a trap!”

I untied him at his plea, saying it would be small loss to the world if he and all his tribe were drowned out of hand. At the same time I told him plainly what would happen if he took advantage of the unmanacling.

“One bad break on your part and you pass out,” I said, touching the pistol which I had thrust into my belt. “I don't particularly want to kill you in cold blood but if you pull it down on yourself you'll get it. And I might add that I can shoot straighter than you did when we let you come on deck.”

At this he made voluble protest as to his good intentions and I was obliged to admit that he seemed to be doing his best to overtake the yacht; though this was possibly only because the overtaking promised to rid him of me. He was a skillful sailor; I'll say that much for him. There was little question but that the schooner was carrying more sail than was at all prudent in a wind which was now beginning to pick up a few whitecaps; when the gusts came her lee scuppers ran full. But Brill was holding her to it grimly, easing the helm only when it seemed inevitable that she would capsize if he didn't.

It is a well-worn nautical maxim that a stern chase is a long chase. After an hour or more, during which time a choppy sea had risen to make the schooner thrash and pound and her masts to bend like whipstocks, Brill shouted to me that the topsails had to come off or we'd have the sticks out of her. Accordingly Pedro and Jose manned the downhauls and the dangerous canvas was taken in. By this time the wind had freshened to a half gale and a little later we had to reef both the fore and the mainsail, in which operation I lent a hand with the Minorcans while Brill held the schooner in the wind to bring the booms inboard.

Even under the reduced canvas we flew along, as it seemed to me, at undiminished speed, but try as we might we could not reduce the distance between us and the Waikiki. After a time it occurred to me that Jeffreys might be playing with us; that he might after all have recognized the Vesta in passing and have given his sailing master orders to tail us along but not to let us overtake the yacht. I couldn't conceive of any reason which he might have for doing such a thing but there seemed to be no other way of accounting for the unvarying distance between the two vessels when we were now sailing two miles to one we had been making when the chase began.

More than half convinced that this was the explanation of our inability to come up to the yacht I settled down to a grim determination to hang on and at least keep the Waikiki in sight, if possible, and so to follow her into her port. Up to this time I had had no reason to doubt that the port would be Havana; Alison had said Havana and so had the Sefton girl. But now a disturbing question of doubt was arising. It was past mid-afternoon and Dorgan had said that we would be off Key West by nightfall. In rummaging for arms in the cabin I had come across a roll of dingy charts and I went below to get it, taking a look at Dorgan while I was in the cabin. He was breathing regularly but was still locked in a stupor from the effects of the head wound. Going back to Brill at the wheel I showed him the chart covering the strait.

“Whereabouts are we?” I asked.

With a grimy forefinger he indicated our probable position; at a point about one third of the distance from the Keys to Cuba and about the same distance southeast of Key West. When he did that I glanced at the compass bearing in the binnacle. Our course was precisely what it had been all day; a few points to the south of due west.

'We're following that yacht,” I said. “Where is she heading for?”

“You tell, if you know,” he returned; adding: “I'm damned if I do.”

“Key West?” I queried.

He shook his head. “She'd be bearin' up more to the north if she was headin' for the Key.”

“Havana, then?”

“Not in a million years. Havana ain't such a mighty sight off o' due south fr'm where we're at now. If she holds the course she's been steerin' all day the first landfall she'll make'll be the coast o' Mexico, somewheres along about Tampico.”

Here was a mystery a mile wide. What had happened in two days to change the plans of the yacht party? If Alison could only have told me a little more—but she hadn't—couldn't. I was left completely in the dark. But there was only one thing to do, as I saw it. If the Waikiki was to go on steaming out into the Gulf of Mexico bound for some port unknown we were going to keep her in sight as long as we could. There was neither rhyme nor reason in such a determination but I was in no frame of mind to listen to reason.

“You, and Dorgan too, if he ever comes to his senses again, are due to be mighty sorry that you took a stranger's money to shanghai another stranger,” I said to Brill. “We are going to overtake that yacht before we quit if we have to chase her to Panama and back. That's what you've let yourselves in for, if you care to know.”

“But, lookee here!” he babbled; “we ain't 'found' for no such v'yage as that! There ain't scoffin's enough in the galley to feed us a week!”

“That is all right,” I told him. “When the provisions give out we'll go hungry. The one thing we won't do is to quit until you've put me aboard the yacht. That goes as it lies.”

Three hours later the sun dropped into the sea ahead of us and his level rays glorified for some brief seconds the shapely outline of the Waikiki still steaming straight into the eye of the sunset. And when darkness came we were tossing alone upon the heaving waters; alone but for the shimmer of the electrics on the after deck of the distant yacht, her lights serving as our guiding beacon.

CHAPTER V.

CHAOS AND OLD NIGHT.

When it came to making preparations for the night the wind had gone down some what and there was a curiously oppressive heat abroad. At first I was afraid that with the decrease of our chief motive power the Waikiki might walk away from us and be lost in the darkness but after a couple of hours had passed with her lights neither nearer nor farther away I knew she must still be proceeding at half speed, in which case there was a chance that with good luck we might possibly be able to keep her in sight during the night.

If at that time Israel Brill was setting me down as a lunatic ripe for lacing in a strait-jacket I couldn't have blamed him much. The bare idea of chasing a fast steam yacht to an unknown destination with no better pursuer than a coasting schooner with a loose-jointed gasoline motor for an auxiliary was doubtless a lunacy of the first water; it was like trying to chase an express train with a hand car. But I was in no frame of mind to listen to the calm logic of reason. There was room in my brain for only one obsessing and inextinguishable desire—to get aboard of the Waikiki and explain to Alison Carter just why it was that I had failed to keep the Miami appointment with her.

With the wind moderated and the reefs shaken out of our sails I directed José to take the wheel, told him to tell Pedro to turn in and gave Brill leave to go below. Curiously enough, as I thought, he was a bit dubious about taking the leave.

“I ain't trustin' this weather much,” he said, sniffing to windward as if he could smell a change coming. “You know anything about handlin' a windjammer?”

“Not enough to hurt,” I admitted.

“Well, if it comes on to blow, you yell for me. This old hooker ain't so hellish much to look at but I don't want to lose her in a gale o' wind.”

“To say nothing of the small fortune in contraband you've got under hatches in the hold,” I put in.

“You said it,” he returned. “I reckon that stuff's worth a heap more than what the schooner is, if you'd put it into money.” Then: “What you aimin' to do with us when we lay that yacht aboard—if ever we do?”

“Nothing,” I replied. “I'm no Revenue officer. I'm merely making you undo what you did to me in Biscayne Bay the other night. When you've done it you may go your ways.”

“Huh! That don't sound so damn' crazy, neither.” Then the craven nature of the man had to come to the front: “It ain't my fault that you was crimped t'other night. I was dead set agin' it—told Jim Dorgan it was a low-down trick to play on anybody.”

“Wait and say that to Dorgan's face when he gets up and can use his one good arm,” I jeered; and with that I drove him below.

My watch on deck, which was kept until midnight, was entirely uneventful. Notwithstanding Brill's tentative prophecy about the weather the wind held steady out of the northeast and the schooner rode easily. The motor thumped away with little attention from me and our rate of sailing was about the average we had maintained during the day. Out ahead the shimmering glow of the Waikiki's lights held the same relative position, as nearly as I could judge; and she, and we, were steering the same course as at sundown—a little to the south of west. By this time I knew we must be considerably west of the Havana meridian and I was led to wonder still more pointedly why the plans of the yacht party had been changed and what the change portended.

Though José's English was strictly limited I managed to hold a bit of talk with him now and then through the lonely hours and to learn a little of his history. Neither he nor Pedro, who was his cousin, were in any sort desperadoes. They had been fishermen in the Minorca Islands and had emigrated together to Cuba. Finding life harder there than it had been in the old country they had drifted to the United States where they had served as sailors on board a number of coasting vessels. They knew nothing about the liquor smuggling or its ethics. They had been offered a job on the Vesta and had taken it, asking no questions.

On my part I told the friendly little foreigner as much as I could make him understand of my own predicament, namely that I had a friend and an enemy on board of the vessel ahead of us and that I was anxious to help the friend and to do whatever was needful to the enemy. To help wear out the long watch I got him to show me a bit about steering a fore-and-aft-rigged sailing ship; and after I had the hang of it I took the wheel for a while and relieved him.

When the time came to call Brill and Pedro to take the deck I had José rout out his no-English-speaking cousin first and give him, as my interpreter, his instructions. He was to obey Brill's orders but only in matters strictly pertaining to the handling of the schooner. Apart from that he was to carry one of the pistols and keep a sharp eye upon his erstwhile skipper. If Brill should make any move toward trying to recapture his ship or to change the course I was to be summoned at once. These instructions went through all right if a series of “si's” and nods could be taken as evidence that they were understood, but Pedro balked at the pistol. When I offered him the weapon he shook his head and pulled out his sailor's knife.

“He say he not can hit nossing weth peestol,” José explained. “He say he cut heem weth knife.”

I thought I was quite safe to turn in and leave the schooner in Brill's hands, and Brill in Pedro's hands. Mutiny seemed to have no terrors for the Minorcans; but as to that I doubted if either Brill or Dorgan would ever go within gunshot of a court of law to prefer charges against my allies. The bootleggers were too deep in the mud themselves to try to pull anybody else into the mire.

Brill turned out grumbling and swearing when I shook him awake and by the light of the smoky,, swinging cabin lamp went to rub his eyes and stare at the barometer. “Ump!” he growled; “jus' as I thought—glass a-droppin' like a deep-sea lead. Told you afore I turned in that I smelled hell a-comin'.”

“Weather?” I queried; adding: “It's bright starlight.”

“That's aw right; but the glass don't lie,” he retorted and with that he stumbled sleepily up the steps to take his watch on deck.

Left to myself I took the swinging lamp out of its sling and went to have a look at Dorgan. He was stirring a little and moaning in his sleep and when the light of the lamp fell upon his face he opened his eyes and licked his lips like a drunken man awakening from a debauch. “Water!” he gurgled and I put the lamp down and drew him a cupful from the cabin keg.

He gulped the drink to the final drop and let the cup fall on the floor. Gropingly he put his free hand to his head and felt the bandages.

“What hit me?” he asked thickly.

“I did,” I said.

Next he felt the clumsy bundle that represented the broken arm and raised his head to try to look at it.

“Busted?” he queried.

“Both bones,” I told him.

“The hell you say! Whadju do it with?”

“A belaying pin. The next time you go to sea you'd better be sure your belaying pins are made of wood instead of iron pipe.”

He licked his lips again and closed his eyes. When he opened them there was a flicker of something like sardonic humor in them.

“Say; it was a helluva scrap, wasn't it? I didn't allow there was a man this side o' Dempsey that could stand up to me as long as you did. Whadju do to Isra'l Brill?”

I told him briefly and he said: “That was dead easy. Isra'l's got a streak o' yellow in him a mile wide. What you doin' with the schooner?”

“Chasing that steam yacht. When I can get aboard of her, you and Brill may take your hooker and go where you please.”

“Jesso. What about the crew?”

“They are with me for the present. You and Brill have bullied them over the edge and I don't think they'll sail with either of you again.”

Silence for a bit and then he said: “Of course you know what yacht that is and who's in her?”

“Yes. I imagine I know a good bit more about her and her company than you do.”

“Well, it's a helluva note all round,” he remarked, closing his eyes again; whereat I put the lamp back in its place and telling him to go to sleep if he could rolled into the bunk lately vacated by Brill and was dead to the world about as soon as I hit the blanket roll that served as a pillow.

I hadn't been asleep for more than a few minutes—or so it seemed, though it turned out to have been a couple of hours—before I was rudely awakened by being flung bodily out of the bunk. At first I thought Brill had taken some sort of a hitch in his courage and had attacked me but I soon found that it was the sea and the wind that were doing the attacking. The little ship seemed to be on her beam ends and the noise on deck, canvas slatting and thundering, cordage shrieking and seas crashing, was like pandemonium let loose. Above the clamor I could hear Brill bawling to me to turn out; and dazed and half drowned in a deluge of water that came pouring down the companion steps I clawed my way to the deck and closed the slide.

Pandemonium was the name for it. A squall, or in my ignorance of nautical matters I thought it was a squall, had struck us and everything was in the wildest confusion. Brill was at the wheel trying to head the schooner up into the wind and the two Minorcans were doing their best to haul in on the mainsheet to help her around. Instinctively I tailed on to the sheet with them and after a battle that threatened to take the canvas sheerly out of the bolt ropes we won. Agile as a monkey, José leaped to the halyards the moment we had the great boom inboard and let the sail come down on the run.

“Make fast—anyway to hold it!” Brill yelped; and after we had flung ourselves upon the sail which was still threatening to carry itself and us away and had blindly muzzled it with the slack of the halyards: “Now the fores'l! Jump for it if you want to go on livin'!”

Since it had little more than half the spread of the big mainsail we got the foresail down and smothered in short order, though with her head to the rising seas the Vesta was taking water in tons over the forward bulwarks and the three of us were all but swept away half a dozen times before we could get the boom guyed amidships and the thrashing canvas subdued. How we were able to do all this in the paralyzing confusion, with the seas tumbling aboard and no light save that which was born of a sort of phosphorescent glow that came from the sea itself I can never tell. But it was done in some fashion.

Through it all I had to give Brill the credit of playing the man and the able skipper, however much he lacked of attaining the stature of a man in other respects. In the breath-catching intervals I could see him braced at the wheel, holding the schooner from falling off by sheer main strength, his stocky, shapeless body bent like a strained bow. And above the unearthly din of the elements his bellowed directions came to our ears in a steady stream of orders, each in its proper sequence and none of them, as I remembered afterward, garnished with his usual outpouring of profanity.

With the bulk of her canvas off, the schooner was meeting the mounting billows with only her head sails—staysail and jib—still spread. But these were more than she could carry if Brill should let her fall off to run before the hurricane. And to run before it was our only hope; though she was doing nobly the little ship could not rise to the curling crests which came crashing down upon her foredeck like a succession of waterspouts.

“Get them head sails off her, quick!” Brill yelled. “I can't hold her much longer!” and together we three began to struggle forward, fighting desperately for every foot of the way with the seas that were coming aboard.

Before we could reach the foremast the schooner began to fall off in spite of Brill's utmost exertions to hold her, and the slat ting, hammering headsails took the wind, bellying out with thunderings like the booming of guns. Being the lighter canvas the jib went first. I had a glimpse of it between gasps as it was flicked out of its bolt ropes as if by the sweep of a whirling, keen-edged sword to disappear as a white patch in the spume to leeward. As for the heavier staysail, we got it down and reefed to a mere triangular patch but only after strugglings that were fairly superhuman and drownings so heavy and prolonged that more than once I thought the schooner was actually going down by the head and would never recover.

The instant we had finished this man-killing job Brill put the helm up, and spinning like a toe dancer under the lift of-the rag of staysail we had left spread the Vesta whirled and raced away before the blast, taking breath-cutting leaps over the mountainous seas, climbing their backs with a rush like some frantic wild thing trying to escape and sliding down into the yawning valleys at an angle that seemed to promise certain engulfing at the bottom.

When we got back to the after deck Brill was about all in. “Rig a life line and lash me to it!” he panted; and while I didn't know what he meant, José did, and in a trice we had a line stretched from rail to rail, with a sling around Brill's body to keep him from being torn from his place at the wheel. Motioning Pedro to take hold with him I asked him what about the motor, which was alternately racing like a windmill when the propeller kicked out of water and bringing up with a shock that threatened to tear the inwards out of the vessel when the spinning screw buried itself in a following sea.

“We need it!” he gulped. “That rag o' stays'l ain't enough to give her steerage way and if she broaches to we're gone! But the damn' thing's goin' to rip the inside out of her the way it's actin' now!”

I may confess frankly that it asked for a mustering up of all the nerve I had left before I could dive into the engine hold of that tossing chip on the sea mountains to do what the occasion called for; namely, to stand over the straining motor, easing it when the screw kicked out and giving it the gas again at the burying moment. There was no way of making it do this automatically; it was a plain case of handwork with the throttle—off when the propeller came to the surface; on when the next plunge gave it a grip, timing the movements with the leap and slide of the schooner over the giant seas.

I got the hang of it after a few experiments and fancied I could feel at once the easing of strain on the vessel. Though the racing speed did not slacken and the sickening climb and still more sickening descent into the trough kept on with the regularity of a pendulum swing the laboring motor no longer threatened to tear itself loose from its bed on the keelson, so we were that much better off.

Now that I was chained to a mechanical job asking little or nothing of the brain I began to speculate anxiously upon the probable fate of the Waikiki in the hurricane. In the short time I had spent aboard of her at Miami I had seen nothing of her sailing master or crew, other than the cabin stewards. If she were well-officered and manned she was most likely doing just what we were doing; running before the storm; making heavy weather of it without doubt, as we were, but in no special peril if she were well handled. Hiram Carter had spared neither pains nor money to make her entirely seaworthy and I knew that she had twice crossed the Atlantic in winter storms and had thus proved herself.

Yet, we were in the midst of a raging hell of waters—and Alison was aboard of the yacht. Steadily and for years I had been telling myself that I was not in love with my childhood playmate; that Hiram Carter's money had built an impassable barrier between us for all time. But I knew, now that the assurance was a lie; that she was more to me than any other woman could ever be; and the mere knowledge that she was in a vessel—no matter how stanch—exposed to all the dangers of a tropical hurricane, wrung me with the torments of a lost soul. Why hadn't Jeffreys put in at Havana as his original purpose was? What crazy notion had sent him steaming out upon an unknown sea when his ship's instruments must have told him, as ours had told Brill, that a storm was on its way?

There were no answers to these questions. The thing was done and my chance for interference, if I had ever had one, had vanished in the roaring of the blast. Morning might find the two ships, if both were afloat, a hundred miles apart, and the next time I should see Alison, if we both lived to meet again, she would be—but no; I couldn't, wouldn't think of her as Wickham Jeffreys' wife. That way lay madness incurable.

For hours that were longer than any unbroken night watch I had ever endured I stood over the throbbing motor, twitching the throttle lever first one way and then the other, keeping even time with the plunge of the schooner over the wave crest, the hissing descent into the trough and the racing climb up the next wave. Morning came at last. I saw the first faint graying of a delayed and storm-driven dawn marking the square outline of the hatchway overhead. There was an ankle-depth of sea water surging back and forth in the small engine hold, and I coupled in the power-driven bilge pump to free it, as I had had to do many times during the night.

Though the tempest was still shrieking like a chorus of fiends in the schooner's rigging, its extreme violence seemed to be spent. The billows continued to run mountain high but their crests no longer curled and broke to throw the propeller out of water and the endless twitchings of the throttle became unnecessary. Stiff and weary, I pulled myself up the ladder, clinging limpetlike to the hatchway coaming when I got my head above the deck level. Brill, or what I thought might be his dead body, was hanging in the rope sling by which we had anchored him to the life line and José had the wheel. I crept aft and drew myself up by the binnacle post to speak to the Minorcan.

“The skipper—is he dead?” I asked.

“No lo sé. I t'ink he will be—how you call eet?—knock' out.”

I freed Brill from the lashings and he stirred feebly, as one utterly exhausted. Even with the help he had had the job at the wheel had been a frightful one. Leaving him lying spread-eagled upon the deck I made my way to the galley forward. A fire was out of the question, of course, but in rummaging the day before I had found a few candles of solidified alcohol. With one of these I contrived to heat a kettle of water and to make a pot of strong coffee. After I had poured a little of the hot drink down Brill's throat he was able to sit up and help himself to the rest.

Shortly afterward the two of us, strange bedfellows of peril, managed to open some of the food tins and prepare breakfast of a sort, and it was Brill himself who carried a portion to José, taking the helm while the Minorcan ate. In the cabin I fed Dorgan what little he would eat. So far as I could determine he was none the worse for the half night of terror. He wanted to know if we'd lost the number of our mess in the storm and I told him we hadn't; that we were all still alive and kicking, thanks to Brill's seamanship.

“Yah,” he grunted. “You'll have to hand it to Isra'l when it comes to worryin' a windjammer through a blow. That's one place where his 'yellow' don't show none. You've lost the yacht in the raffle, I reckon?”

“I suppose so,” I admitted but I added that the weather was still too thick to let us see very far.

“You'll never see her ag'in,” he thrust in with a grin that the pain of his wounds turned into a ghastly grimace. “I know them white-collar yacht skippers. They ain't one, two, three when the real thing hits 'em. I'll bet my share o' the rake-off on the cargo we got in the hold that Mister Man's play-sized liner went down with all on board when that twister hit 'em last night.”

And because Dorgan's gruesome prediction was the echo of a great fear that was hourly growing upon me, I climbed to the deck with a heavy heart.

CHAPTER VI.

BREAKERS AHEAD!

When I asked Brill how long the storm was likely to hold he gave me small encouragement.

“I've knowed 'em to blow like this till you'd think there wa'n't never goin' to be no let-up,” he said, adding: “I ain't noticed the glass risin' any yet.”

A glance at the compass showed that our course had changed completely. As we had been driving directly before the wind ever since the storm had struck us we had been obliged to go wherever we were sent; the sending now was in a southeasterly direction, which proved that the wind had shifted a full third of the way around the circle at some time during the night. Our changed course must, I thought, inevitably wreck us upon the western extremity of Cuba if we should keep on and I spoke of this to Brill.

“Needn't lose no sleep about that,” was his reply. “The shift o' wind didn't come till just a little afore day and by that time I reckon we'd left Cape San Antonio a ways astern.”

“In that case, what land will we make first if we keep on driving?”

“Huh!” he snorted, “your guess is as good as anybody's. The way we're headin' now we've got the hull derned Caribbean ahead of us. I do' know no more'n a goat where we're at and I won't know till I can get a chance to shoot the sun.”

The whole Caribbean! I thought of the scanty provision in the galley lockers, with five men to be fed. And until the storm should abate enough to let us make sail we were completely at the mercy of the fates, compelled to go wherever the pouring blast should blow us.

Now the life of a construction engineer, as everybody knows, is never any too thickly crowded with creature comforts, but in all of my twenty-seven years I had never put in such a wretched day as this we tholed through from daybreak to dark. Though less cyclonic than it had been during the night the wind continued to blow a tremendous gale, the sea ran mountain high and the atmosphere was so thick with cloud and scud and spindrift that at no time were we able to see more than a few hundred yards in any direction.

Under such conditions life aboard our chip of a vessel was merely endurance. The man at the wheel had to be lashed at his post and though we continued to tear along at express speed under our patch of stay sail and the kick of the motor, only eternal vigilance at the helm kept the towering following seas from broaching us. Naturally, with a total lack of nautical skill I was useless at the steering job, though time and again I offered to take a chance and relieve the three who were pretty thoroughly done in under the long strain. But Brill wouldn't trust me.

“No,” was his stereotyped objection; “I reckon you've got the nerve all right, but you ain't got the 'know it.' We're right side up yet and I ain't got no notion o' lettin' a landsman drowned me at the finish.”

Debarred thus from taking any useful part in the handling of the schooner I did what little else there was to be done; looked after the motor, prepared the scanty meals and served them and redressed Dorgan's scalp wound, which I was glad to note showed no signs of infection. Helpless with his broken arm and suffering, as I made no doubt, from the pain of his hurts and the pitching and tossing of the vessel which gave him no chance to relax and lie easily the big man was singularly good-natured in a grim fashion. While I was putting the clean bandages on his head he asked me what about that story of Wickham Jeffreys'—that I was in danger of going to the penitentiary.

“It was a lie cut out of the whole cloth,” I told him. “Did you believe it at the time?”

“Well, it did sound sort o' fishy,” he confessed. “Was there somethin' else back of it?”

I thought no harm could come of telling him the simple truth.

“He wants to marry the woman I want to marry and I was in his way.”

“Well, now!” rumbled the giant; “ain't that hell and repeat? If you'd only told me there was a woman in it——”

“Your sandbag didn't give me a chance,” I interrupted. “And if I had been allowed to tell you, you wouldn't have believed me.”

“Nothin' so sure about that,” he protested. “I'm kinda mushy when you work the woman racket on me. She was in the yacht with that smooth-talkin' double crosser?”

“It is her father's yacht,” I explained. “She is one of the party on board.”

“Huh! I don't blame you none for raisin' merry hell a-tryin' to get back to where you belonged. Too bad she's drownded. I reckon it'd 'a' been some comfort if you could 'a' drownded along with her.”

“You seem to be mighty confident that the yacht hasn't outlived the storm.”

“Yacht may be all right but I know them white-collar skippers,” he said. “But I reckon it don't matter so much, after all; you'll likely be drownded on the same day o' the month with her, anyhow.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Isra'l says this here storm's one o' them circulars and he's scared we're a-workin' to'ards the center of it. If so be we are, you can tell all the home folks good-by. The old hooker'll never live past the shift o' wind that comes when you hit the suck hole of a twister.”

Landsman as I was I knew that Dorgan wasn't drawing upon his imagination in predicting the almost certain fate of a ship drawn into the vortex of a circular hurricane. Was that to be the end of us? I wondered. And when I thought of the fate which Dorgan had so confidently measured out to the Waikiki and her company I was not so deeply moved over the prospect for the Vesta as I might otherwise have been.

When night fell—it was only a change from twilight to full darkness, as you might say—the gale was still at its height and from all appearances we were in for another night of peril. By this time the terrific pitching and tossing had become a keen agony to all of us; more, since the Vesta was by no means a new vessel, her seams were opening badly under the continued racking. All during the afternoon I had been forced to run the bilge pump at intervals to keep the leakage down and I remarked with increasing concern that the intervals grew shorter toward night.

This meant that I had my night's work cut out for me in the engine hold if the schooner was to be kept from foundering, but before attacking it I took Dorgan's supper down to him and tried to make him as comfortable for the night as the conditions would admit. As I was leaving him he called me back and thrusting his good arm under his blanket pillow drew out a sailor's ditty bag and gave it to me.

“If you come alive out o' this and I don't—and you stand a heap better chance than what I do—there's a li'l' woman up in Jacksonville that belongs to me; you can find her by askin' for Tom Beasley, Clyde Line dock. You swipe your watch and money out o' that bag, along with the yellow-back cent'ry his nobs paid me for kidnapin' you, and give what's left to the li'l' woman. It's all I got.”

I don't believe I'm any too soft-hearted and Dorgan's treatment of me before his beating had not been calculated to make me love him. But the finding of this streak of sheer humanity in him got me.

“Dorgan,” I said, “you're not altogether the brute I've been taking you for, after all. I owe you an apology because I've been thinking you were. Be sure that I'll do what you ask—if I should live and you don't. And the hide goes with the horns; the little woman you speak of gets the hundred-dollar bribe with the rest of your estate.”

“That's right white of you; I'm damned if it ain't,” he said simply; and with that he turned his face to the wall and I went to tackle the all-night pumping job in the engine hold.

There was a good six-inch depth of water sloshing back and forth in the machinery den when I dropped into it and a little longer delay on my part would have put the motor' out of commission. I started the pump at once but it was a long time before I could tell whether or not it was gaining anything on the leaks. Perched on the cracker box I got a little sleep now and again but it was a long night and a trying one. Having to stick grimly to my post I was obliged to leave the deck to Brill and the Minorcans; but while I didn't trust Brill at all I thought I could depend upon my two allies to hold him harmless if he should try to regain the upper hand.

Along toward morning the pitching and tossing grew less violent and I began to hope that the worst was over. Anxiously I watched the open hatchway to catch the first glimmerings of dawn but I missed them after all, for I was sound asleep on my perch when Brill's shout, calling me to turn out, aroused me. Startled by the note of fear in his voice I sprang up, rubbing the sleep out of my eyes. The new day was come; there was blue sky overhead and the sun was shining.

But there was another shock of surprise lying in wait for me when I tumbled up the ladder. Brill was at the wheel, the wind had subsided to half a gale and though the waves were still running high the schooner was laboring less heavily. Yet it seemed that we had escaped foundering at sea only to be wrecked at last. Dead ahead and so near that the thunder of the breakers upon an outer reef beat upon the ear like the booming of cannon there was land. Though Brill was doing his best to claw off with the help of the patch of staysail it was evident that the wind, the seas and a strong tidal current were driving us helplessly upon the reef.

This was why Brill had yelled to me. Pedro and José were fighting desperately with the water-soaked lashings of the furled foresail and I understood at once that if we were to have any chance at all to save the schooner it would only be by making sail and making it mighty quickly. In the pitching surges the motor was barely giving us weak steerage way.

In the hot work of the next few minutes my heart was in my mouth. At every lift of the ship I expected her to come crashing down upon the reef. Working like fiends we three finally contrived to cast off the wet lashings of the foresail and to hoist and sheet it home. With this additional canvas spread, Israel Brill proved that even the paltriest villain may have some redeeming qualities. With a quick spin of the wheel that brought the schooner up when she was within half a length of the breakers he averted the catastrophe for the moment, at least. But this was only a stop-gap that served to lay us broadside on to the rocks.

“Head sails!” Brill yelled. “Shake the reefs out o' that stays'l! Jump to it for your lives!”

We jumped and after a breathless tussle with wet and swollen ropes the staysail was hoisted. Brill put the helm hard up and I fell into the engine hold to speed the motor to its limit, climbing out again immediately to lend a hand with the wheel. But in spite of all our efforts the schooner continued to edge in toward the crash. Doing his best Brill could only hold her on a course roughly paralleling the reef and we all saw that it needed nothing but the urge of an extra heavy sea to send us to our finish.

It was then that I remembered Dorgan lying crippled in his berth between decks. Shouting to José to come and take my place as an extra hand at the wheel I dashed down into the stuffy little dog kennel of a cabin. Dorgan was sitting on the edge of the bunk, blinking dizzily from the effort of getting up. He knew something was wrong but was too bewildered to realize what it was.

“All hands on deck!” I shouted. “We're about to go on the rocks!”

“I reckoned it was something like that,” he muttered and with my help he got upon his feet. Half leading, half carrying him I got him up the companion steps. There were half a dozen life belts on the ship but they were all rotten and frayed and ready to drop to pieces. I picked out the best one and tied it around him as he sat on the deck with his back braced against the deck house and he gave me a grateful look like that of a dog out of whose paw you have just pulled a festering thorn, saying: “You're the first white man I've knowed in a month o' Sundays; you look out for yourself and that li'l' poke I give you and never mind me.”

As he spoke the big seventh wave we had all been watching for came surging in froth topped and mountain high from wind ward. I had a fleeting glimpse of Pedro wrapping legs and arms around the weather shrouds of the mainmast for an anchorage against the shock, of Brill shoving José away from the wheel and bending his thick body to spin the spokes, of the schooner rising on the huge billow to turn slowly head on to the reef as Brill put the helm hard down, and then—

The expected crash did not come. Instead, there was a long, scraping grind as the ship, lifted high on the insweeping surge, barely cleared the jagged coral, shot across the inner lagoon, buried her forefoot in the sand of a white beach and broke her bowsprit short off in collision with the palm trees that grew almost down to the water's edge. Brill had taken the only chance that offered, which was that the big sea would carry the Vesta completely over the breaker barrier. And it had.

CHAPTER VII.

THE ENCHANTED ISLE

When the Vesta shot across the comparatively quiet lagoon and came to rest with the slow shock of her grounding upon the shelving beach I think we were all more or less dazed by the sudden and unhoped-for escape from a shipwreck which would doubtless have blotted all five of us out, since the huge seas pounding on the reef would speedily have beaten the life out of the strongest swimmer.

Yet, as it presently appeared, we had missed the shipwreck on the reef only to lose the schooner in another way. Though I had jumped into the engine pit the instant we were over the barrier, and Pedro and José, yelled at by Brill, had let the foresail come down on the run our headway could not be checked quickly enough; and though Brill had spun the wheel fiercely he had only contrived to hit the land quartering and we were beached hard and fast with every sea that came over the reef ramming us still deeper into the sand.

Not to miss a chance while the seas were still sweeping in strongly enough to lift the schooner's stern we put the motor in the reverse and tried to back off. But in a few minutes Brill shouted down to me that it was no good and I stopped the motor and climbed to the deck. Brill, forgetting that but for the Providential “seventh” wave he might have joined the rest of us in providing food for the fishes, was exploding in blasphemies so horrible as to make even Dorgan call him down.

“Shut up, you cockroach!” he roared. “Ain't it enough that you've still got the breath o' life in you? Usin' it to cuss the good God that let you keep it ain't goin' to get you nowheres!”

Brill quieted down at that and presently climbed over the stranded bow with me to see how badly we were hooked up. A very cursory examination seemed to prove that the schooner was likely to stay right where she was until she rotted. Fully a fourth of her keel was bedded in the sand and my own conclusion was that nothing short of the power of the biggest wrecking tug afloat would ever pull her into deep water.

“We're high and dry,” I told Dorgan when we had climbed aboard again; then I asked Brill if he had any notion as to where we were—what land we'd made. His response was a mere guess that anybody might have thrown out; that we'd been blown upon one of the many small islands or keys with which the map of the Caribbean is dotted. Asked if these keys were inhabited he said that some of them were and others were not, adding with more of the morose cursings that it had probably been our luck to hit upon one of the uninhabited ones.

To prove or disprove this appeared to me to be the first matter of importance. Our food supply would be exhausted in three or four days at the most. If the island were inhabited we could live; if it were not—well in that case we should at least know what we were up against. Accordingly I detailed Pedro to stay in the schooner with Dorgan and took Brill and José with me on an exploring expedition.

As a means of acquiring any definite in formation about our landfall the tramp ashore was a conspicuous failure. Taking the northeastern beach first we came at a distance of perhaps half a mile from the schooner to a place where the outer reef drew in so close to the mainland as scarcely to break the huge seas which were still tumbling in. At this point and for as far as we could see beyond it the great billows were pounding upon the island beach, each one carrying a miniature tidal wave far up into the jungle. Clearly there was no thoroughfare here and after two or three half-hearted attempts to penetrate the dense tropical growth inland we turned back and tried the opposite direction.

With the exception that the cul-de-sac was somewhat farther away from our stranded ship conditions to the southwest were much the same as we had found them in the other direction. Though the barrier reef preserved its distance it was so nearly submerged that the seas broke entirely over it. Hence our exploration was cut short as before and for the same reason. This time we made another and more determined effort to penetrate to the interior of the island; did so penetrate for perhaps half a mile and then gave it up and worked our way laboriously back to the beach through thicketings as dense as a quick-set hedge. We saw no signs of human occupation in all this wandering and I doubted much if we should find any, even after the sea should go down and give us leave to circle the island by way of the beach path.

For the remainder of that day we did nothing because there was nothing much that we could do. At Dorgan's suggestion we set a distress signal flying from the schooner's mainmast and as long as daylight lasted one or another of us was constantly sweeping our half of the horizon on the chance of sighting a passing ship. But nothing came of this.

By sunset the sea had gone down and the wind, which had blown freshly out of the northwest all day, began to die away, drop ping to a dead calm shortly after dark to usher in a night of sweltering heat. Like the salamanders they were Dorgan and Brill elected to sleep in the cabin bunks and the Minorcans, European-peasantwise, shut themselves in the dog hole of a forecastle. I said the sky was all the cover I needed in such torrid weather, so spreading my blankets on the after deck and with a coil of the mainsheet for a pillow I prepared to get what sleep might be had under the double handicap of the heat and a dense cloud of voracious mosquitoes.

It was the mosquitoes that led to a discovery which banished all thoughts of sleep, for the time being at least. After I had fought the stinging pests for a while I sat up with my back against the rail and tried, with the result of half stifling myself, to make a mosquito curtain out of a fold of the blanket. Failing in this I remembered that engine oil used as an ointment was something of a deterrent and got up to grope my way to the hatch of the engine hold. In the act I was brought to face the dark mass of the forest into which the Vesta had thrust her bowsprit. Over the tops of the trees which marked a line scarcely distinguishable between the forest shadow and the black bowl of the sky shutting down upon it I saw a faint red glow.

For a moment I thought it might be the rising moon and then I remembered that it was now the dark of the moon. But if it wasn't the moon it must be a fire—and a fire meant inhabitants. Without waking any of the others I crept to the bow of the schooner, dropped to the ground and began to worm my way into the heart of the jungle thicket.

This forest treading in the dark proved to be a man-size job, right from the start. What I don't know about tropical plants and trees, as to their names and such, would fill a shelf in a library, but I can testify that I met and wrestled with at least a hundred varieties of vegetable obstacles in the next half hour, from invisible trees that took advantage of the black darkness to get squarely in the way to thorny ground palms that bayoneted me in passing and tangles of vine and brier that caught and tripped me at every step. But whenever there were openings in the dense foliage ahead I could get fresh glimpses of the faint red glow, so I pushed on.

In the course of time the lapping of little seas on a beach could be heard and then I knew I must be nearing the other side of the island. A little later I came out suddenly, not upon the sands of a beach as I had been expecting to, but upon the edge of a small glade or natural clearing open to the sea on one side and surrounded by the jungle on the other three. On the seaward side of the glade a fire was burning and a little way removed from it there were rude shelters, three of them, that looked in the firelight as if they might have been hastily built out of tree branches and palm fronds.

Around the fire there were figures of men, some of them stretched out as if asleep, others sitting up and nursing their knees. Counting, I made seven of these figures and under the rude shelters there were others dimly describable by the glow of the fire; these all recumbent as sleepers.

Naturally my first impulse was to cross to the fire and make my presence known to the men about it. But while I hesitated the singularity of this camp in the glade had time to make itself felt. Who were these people—the fire makers and shelter builders? Not natives, I decided at once. In all the surroundings there was no hint of permanent habitations or cultivated land. But if they were not islanders, who were they?

I don't know whether it was a prompting of caution or a mere prudent desire to learn more about them before making my presence known that led me to skirt the glade toward the shore to obtain a better point of view. But I did it and then the wonderful thing happened. I had barely shown myself, I suppose as a dark shape emerging cautiously from the thicket, when a figure in white sprang up from the sands almost at my feet, gave a frightened little shriek and started to run.

I think it must have been my good angel that let one of the tangling brier vines follow me out of the thicket to trip and send me stumbling on the beach directly in the path of the flying figure in white. At any rate we collided squarely and came down together in the soft sand, I with my arms around the woman and my mouth full of apologies for the awkward stumbling.

It was the apologies that saved me. As I was struggling to my feet and explaining volubly that the collision was the result of the sheerest accident the unknown sharer in the accident flung her arms about my neck, and a voice that I would have known if I had heard it in heaven or hell said:

“Oh, Dick, Dick! Is it—can it be you?”

“Alison!” I gasped. “Of all the unbelievable things——”

“It's a miracle,” she said solemnly; “a heavenly miracle, Dick. Don't you know, I've been sitting here for a long time just wondering if it wouldn't be best to walk out into the water and—and make myself forget that I know how to swim and—and just end it all?”

“For Heaven's sake!” I stammered; “what under the sun has happened?”

She turned to face away from the glade and slipped an arm in mine.

“Let's walk a little way along the beach and I'll tell you—all I can. But first tell me how you come to be here.”

As we walked slowly away and out of sight of the camp fire I told her briefly of the shanghai outrage in Biscayne Bay on the night of the dinner in the Waikiki and its later outcome. When I had finished she was shuddering as if with a chill.

“What an unspeakable villain Wickham is!” she exclaimed. “If I had known that night at dinner what I know now—but I couldn't even imagine it.”

By this time I thought we were far enough from the camp in the glade to be free from any danger of interruption.

“Suppose we sit down and thrash it out?” I suggested. “The sand is dry.”

For a moment or two after we had seated ourselves she was silent. Then she said: “What did you think of me, Dick, when you found me in that hideous lot of rotters on board the Waikiki?”

“It wasn't up to me to think anything. It was your father's yacht and——”

“You had a right to think anything you pleased,” she broke in, “but I can explain—a little. I didn't even know who these people were until after we had left New York and were fairly at sea. Oh, of course, I knew some of them slightly—Peggy Sefton, for one; but they were not in our set at all.”

“I'm listening,” I said.

“It's all tangled up, even now,” she went on. “A month ago daddy went to Honduras to see about a contract of some sort. I wondered a little at his going, because he hasn't taken any active part in the company for a long time. For quite a while before he left I thought he seemed worried over something but he wouldn't tell me what it was.”

I thought I knew that good old Hiram Carter had plenty of cause to worry if he had any inkling of the way in which the Jeffreys, father and son, were dragging the good name of the Carter Company in the mud, but I didn't say so to Alison.

“Is your father still in Honduras?” I asked.

“I am to suppose he is in Havana waiting for me. I had a letter from him about two weeks ago in which he asked me to meet him in Havana. He said that Wickham Jeffreys was going to take a party down in the yacht and that I was to join it. I thought it a little strange, at the time, that he should ask me to do that, because he knew I had been planning to go to the Bermudas with the Wellingtons. But there was a worse thing than that in his letter.”

“Is it tellable?”

“To you, yes. Daddy gave me to understand that he was in some sort of business trouble that involved his good name and that the trouble would vanish if I could make up my mind to marry Wickham Jeffreys. That was all; no explanations or anything.”

“Had he said anything about this before?”

“Not a single word. He knew that Wickham had asked me to marry him—I had told him that. But he had never said a word to influence me, one way or the other. All he said was that he wanted me to be happy.”

“Well?” I prompted.

“The Waikiki was lying in the Hudson and I went aboard with Hedda, my maid, one evening after dinner. Wickham was there to meet us and as he said the other members of the party wouldn't come aboard until late Hedda and I went to our stateroom and went to bed. In the morning we were at sea and I found out what I was in for.”

It sounded only a little less high-handed than my own kidnaping by Dorgan and Brill but I did not interrupt.

“I saw it was going to be the most disagreeable trip I had ever made but I thought I could shut my eyes and ears and stand it for the few days it would take us to reach Havana and daddy.”

“And then?”

“Then Wickham began on me—at the first breakfast table. Without saying it outright he practically told them all that we were—that we were engaged. I couldn't deny it—to that crowd—but I did tell Wickham what I thought of him when I had the chance. Then, Dick, if you'll believe it, he began to threaten! He said daddy—my daddy!—was in trouble, serious trouble, and that it might end in prison. Then he went on to say that his father was the only one that could save the situation but there was so much ill-feeling that he—Wickham—despaired of persuading his father to intervene.”

“All lies,” I broke in, taking a shot in the dark but with complete assurance that it would hit the mark.

“Of course I tried to think so; it was too horrible to think otherwise. But I was alone in that wretched mob of drink maniacs. Wickham kept harping on the one string continually. If we were once married it would straighten out everything. His father couldn't go to extremes, as he was meaning to, if it became a family matter—things like that. I couldn't do anything but fight for time. I told myself that the voyage couldn't last forever and that I'd see daddy in Havana and find out just how much of all this that Wickham was saying was true. Then I thought of you. I was sure you knew all about the affairs of the company and that you were somewhere near Miami and I knew that Wickham didn't know you were there. He'd been telling everybody that you were in Peru.”

Truly, I did know some things about the inner affairs of the big contracting company and I suspected a lot more. Ever since Hiram Carter had withdrawn from the active business management there had been crookedness to burn. And the two Jeffreys were at the heart of the whole disreputable business. But it didn't seem needful, just at the moment, to tell her the things that I knew and the many more that I suspected.

“Did Wickham finally persuade you?” I asked.

“No.”

“Most of your friends—your rich friends—would call it a good match. And if it were to save your father's good name——”

“Even then, I'm afraid I couldn't.”

“Is it because you dislike Jeffreys?”

“I don't dislike him—that isn't the word. I——”

“Is there some other man? Don't tell me if you don't want to.”

Silence for a little space and then with the old straightforwardness that had always made me love her: “I don't know of any reason why I shouldn't tell you, Dick. Yes; there is another man.”

“Ah!” said I. “That makes a difference. Do I know the other man?”

“I—I think not. But we can leave him out. He doesn't care for me and I am sure he doesn't know that I care for him. I said I don't dislike Wickham and I don't—I hate him!”

Again there was a silence. From where we were sitting on the warm beach sand I could see dimly that this side of the island was indented by a deep bay and the glare of the camp fire was in the bight of it. That there was a reef or an outer barrier of some sort on this sea front as well as the other was proved by the distant clash of breakers, quite far out it seemed, though in the darkness I couldn't see to measure distances.

As I strained my eyes and listened, the incongruities, not to call them by any stronger name, came over me with a rush. The last time I had met Alison Carter we had sat across the table from each other in the dining saloon of a richly furnished private yacht and the yacht was peacefully an chored within sight and sound of a thriving, law-abiding winter-resort city. Now, only four days later, we were sitting together on the beach of an unmarked island somewhere in the Caribbean Sea and she was telling me a story that fitted in better with some piratical romance of a past age than it did with the present.

“Suppose you begin at Miami and bring it down to date,” I suggested after the silence had grown embarrassingly long.

“The Waikiki sailed in the afternoon of the next day. Wickham let me go ashore in the morning alone. I think he knew I had made an appointment to meet you but of course he didn't interfere—didn't need to. I waited nearly all the forenoon at the hotel but nobody had seen or heard of you. As soon as I went back the yacht sailed and I found that in my absence it had been determined to cross over to the Bahamas for a few hours' stop. I knew what that meant and I was right. We put in at Bimini just long enough to stock up with liquors for the yacht's table and smoking room. Since that time, or up to early this morning, Hedda and I have been the only sober persons on board.”

“The Havana stop was cut out?”

“Postponed, Wickham said; but now I am beginning to believe that he never meant to go to Havana at all. They were all keeping something from me; I could see that plainly—and that they regarded it as a joke. It made me furious!”

“What did Jeffreys mean to do if he wasn't going to Cuba?” I asked.

“I think he meant to keep the yacht at sea until he succeeded in making me promise to marry him.”

“Ah; cave-man stuff, pure and simple,” I commented. Then: “Do you remember, as the Waikiki was steaming through the Florida Straits three days ago, she passed a schooner also headed westward?”

“We passed a number of vessels that day but I made out the name of only one.”

“Do you recall the name?”

“Yes; it was Vesta.”

“That was my ship; or rather, I should say, it became mine shortly after the Waikiki passed. I headed a mutiny and took the schooner away from the two bootleggers who were in command. You say you saw the name; did Jeffreys see it, too?”

“Yes; it was he who handed me the glass and told me to try if I could make out the lettering.”

“Exactly,” I said. “He knew I was in that hooker and he didn't propose to have it—and me—follow and overtake him. So he gave the yacht's skipper orders to play with us a while and then to go on and lose the Vesta. The hurricane did the rest.”

“And you say the Vesta is wrecked over on the other side of this island?”

“Not wrecked; beached. But she's aground hard enough to stay there until kingdom come; or until she falls to pieces.”

“And those horrid men who shanghaied you?”

“I left them asleep on board the schooner when I came away; also the two Minorcan sailors who helped me in the mutiny. But tell me about the yacht. She's here, I presume?”

“Very much here, indeed. She is a wreck—out at the mouth of this bay. We had a perfectly frightful time in the hurricane. I told you that after the stop at Bimini no body stayed entirely sober. I think that applied to Volney, our sailing master, and to the crew, as well as to the others. A lot of landlubbers couldn't have handled the yacht any worse. We couldn't tell where we were and the wireless was smashed. As nearly as I could tell we just blew wherever the storm chose to take us. It was about two o'clock in the morning of the third day when we struck.”

“Heavens!” I interjected; “what an experience for you!”

“I don't ever want to have to go through another like it. I don't know how we got off. There was the most sickening confusion; no discipline or order; nobody seemed to know what to do or how to do anything. After a terrible time one of the two life boats was got over the side. Most of the crew crowded into it, every man fighting to save himself and paying no attention whatever to anybody else. A sea crushed that boat against the side of the yacht and I think everybody in it was drowned. Then the other was lowered and the rest of us scrambled into it and got away somehow. But when our boat was finally flung up on the beach it was smashed into kindling wood.”

There was a catch in her voice as she stopped and I knew that the frightfulness of the experience was still with her. It was the rawest of tragedies; and so utterly uncalled for with a good sea boat like the Waikiki.

“Did the yacht sink?” I asked.

“No. We all thought she was sinking but she wasn't. She is lying out beyond this point just before us, some distance from shore—a wreck, I suppose.”

“How many of you were saved?”

“All of us cabin people and seven of the crew. And a single day without food has turned us all into savages.”

“Without food?” I echoed. “Do you mean to tell me there were no provisions taken in the boat?”

“Not so much as a tin of ship's biscuit. But that wasn't the worst of it—for me. Wickham Jeffreys! Oh, Dick, I can't tell you what a horrible beast he is! He says—he says I'll be glad enough to marry him when we get away from here.”

For a moment the night was no longer dark for me; it was a bright red. When I could trust myself to speak I said: “When I stumbled out of the woods back yonder a little while ago, did you think I was Jeffreys?”

“I had good reason to, Dick.” She shuddered. And then: “Oh, what a frightful nightmare it has been!”

As may be imagined it didn't take me long to decide definitely upon at least one thing; that was that she was never going back to that hell group in the glade. For a little space the impulse to go there myself to drag Wickham Jeffreys out by the neck and kill him was almost too strong to be put down. But I put it down with the thought that killing would be too good for him. He deserved something worse than sudden death.

“Your maid, Alison,” I said. “Was she among those who were saved?”

“Yes, and she has stood by me so splendidly. This evening, just after dark—if it hadn't been for Hedda——” Her voice trailed off into nothing but I could fill in the break well enough, and again the murder demon whispered in my ear.

“Damn him!” I gritted and I am sure she was able to supply the missing antecedent to the pronoun. Then: “Where is this girl now?”

“I left her asleep under one of the hut shelters.”

“We must get her,” I said shortly. “You're not going back to that bunch, you know.” I got up and lifted her to her feet. “Come with me far enough to show me where your woman is; I'll do the rest.”

And together we set out to return by way of the curving beach to the glade of the camp fire.

CHAPTER VIII.

A FLIGHT IN THE DARK.

When we reached the edge of the glade I was relieved to see that the figures around the dying fire—which Alison told me had been lighted as a smudge to drive the mosquitoes away—were now all recumbent; a fair indication that the survivors of the Waikiki's company were all asleep. Alison wanted to be the one to go and wake her maid but I wouldn't listen to that.

“You will take no more chances, not if I can help it,” I told her. “Just show me where the girl is and I'll bring her out.”

“But she doesn't know you; and if she screams and wakes the others——”

“In that case somebody is mighty likely to get hurt,” I promised. “After what you've told me, I wouldn't mind running amuck in that bunch. It's a crime to let Wickham Jeffreys go on living, don't you think?”

“But, Dick—for my sake!” she pleaded. “You are only one man and there are so many of them!”

“I have this,” I said, showing her the rusty revolver which I had been carrying in my belt as a persuader for Brill.

“Hedda is under this nearest shelter,” she said, pointing. “That is she, on the side farthest from the fire. You'll be awfully careful?”

“Naturally, with your safety at stake. Stay here in the shadows and don't show yourself no matter what happens. I won't be long about it.”

One never knows what experience in life is going to turn up later as the one thing critically needful. Once on a preliminary survey for a mining railroad in the Idaho mountains I had numbered in my gang an old hunter and woodsman who had taught me the art—for it is no less than an art—of deer stalking. Flat on my stomach I wormed my way toward the shelters in the open glade, wriggling forward by slow inchings and never taking my eyes from the figures around the fire. Twice, and once again when one of the men stirred, I stopped and tried to look as much as possible like a log, but there was no alarm given.

In due time I was within arm's reach of the sleeping young woman. Luckily she was lying a little apart from the others, flat on her back and with her mouth open; a big girl, with the arm she had thrown over her head muscular enough to garrote a giant and her deep bosom rising and subsiding like the swell of a little sea. Choosing the instant of breath taking I clapped a hand over the open mouth and put my lips to her ear.

“Don't make a noise—for your life!” I hissed. “Miss Carter wants you!”

For a battling moment I had my hands full to keep her quiet. She was as strong as a daughter of the vikings. As a matter of fact, I had to draw the revolver and press the cold muzzle of it to her head before I could make her understand that she must stop struggling and come with me. And even at that I couldn't force her to lie down and creep away silently. She bounced to her feet and all I could do was to spring up and run with her, ready to cover the retreat with the revolver if the hue and cry should be raised.

Fortunately the alarm wasn't given. As if they had all been drunk the sleepers at the fire and under the shelters slept on undisturbed, and running swiftly we soon reached the fringe of the jungle and found Alison.

From that to getting away from the vicinity of the glade was an easy matter. Keeping in the shadows of the wood we retreated to the beach and soon put distance between us and the landing place of the shipwrecked yacht's company. There was some little method in this. It was certain that as soon as Alison and her maid were missed a search would be made and while I had no plan as yet reaching beyond a return to the stranded schooner I thought it would be wise not to leave too plain a trail across the island. To avoid doing so we kept on along the beach for a full half mile before turning to enter the jungle.

It was then that the real work of the flight began. I had found it difficult enough to cross the island alone in the darkness; but with two women to pilot and help the difficulties were much more than multiplied by three. Uncounted times during the fight with the vegetation I had to kneel and grope to free Alison's skirts or the Swedish girl's from the brier tangles, and even so I knew they were going to come out of the thicket in rags and tatters. But neither of them complained.

As the longest night will finally come to an end so will the most toilsome flight. In due course of time we came out upon the other beach not so very far from the black bulk of the stranded Vesta. A cooling breeze had sprung up, blowing in from the sea, and I was glad, thinking it would drive the mosquitoes back from the beach, as it did. The red lantern which we had hoisted at the Vesta's masthead at dark glowed like a red star against a background of white-starred black velvet and I pointed it out to Alison.

“That light is on the schooner. It's only a little way now. Are you terribly tired?”

“Not so tired as—as hungry,” she returned in a weak little voice.

It was then and only then that I recalled what she had told me about the lack of food in the camp of the castaways. And here I had been dragging her for miles through a labyrinth formidable enough to have wearied a well-fed athlete.

“If you can keep going just a bit longer,” I said, and when I slipped an arm around her she was worn enough to lean on me like a tired child.

At the schooner there was neither sight nor sound to reveal the fact that four men were asleep in her. The rope by means of which I had descended from the deck hung over the bows and I showed the Swedish girl how she was to knot it under her mistress' arms after I had climbed aboard. With the help of the rope I soon had Alison beside me and together we hauled the bulky daughter of vikings up to where she could lay hold of the bulwark.

“Those terrible ruffians who kidnaped you,” said Alison clinging to me as I led her aft, “where are they?”

“Between decks and sound asleep,” I answered. “I don't suppose anything short of an earthquake would rouse them. It is the first chance they have had to catch up in two pretty hard days and nights. And you needn't be afraid of them, asleep or awake. One of them wouldn't hurt you if he could and the other couldn't if he would, because he knows I'd kill him.”

“And the others—the sailors?”

“They are asleep too—in the forecastle. But they are my friends and fellow mutineers. We are three men to two and one of the two has a broken arm. You are perfectly safe, so far as this vessel's company is concerned.”

Telling the two women to sit down on my blankets and rest I tiptoed forward to the galley and with one of the alcohol candles for a fire heated some water and made a pot of coffee. This, with a tin of biscuits, a can of bully beef and another of apricots, I carried aft to the starved ones.

“Can you manage to eat by the starlight?” I asked.

“I could eat in the deepest, darkest dungeon of a Middle Ages castle,” Alison said, with a tired little laugh; and the laugh did me more good than anything except the way she ate and drank and chirked up under the stimulus of the food and the hot coffee and speedily became the self-reliant, clear headed girl I had known so well in our childhood days.

“Well, what next?” she inquired after the biscuit tin had been emptied, even to the crumbs, by the two of them. “Do you suppose Wickham Jeffreys is going to let me vanish into thin air without trying to find out what has become of me?”

I had rearranged the blankets and now I told the Swedish girl to lie down and have her nap out. When she was asleep, which was in less than half a minute after she had stretched herself under the lee of the rail, I answered Alison's question by asking one of my own:

“Tell me; is Jeffreys as madly in love with you as all this cave-man stuff would seem to indicate?”

“Honestly, Dick, I don't think he is; not even the kind of love that such a brute as he is is capable of. I imagine there is something bigger and deeper at the bottom of all this. Whatever else he is, Wickham is not a fool. He must know that if he should force me to marry him nothing on earth could force me to live with him as his wife after we get back to civilization.”

“You have no idea of what the bigger thing is?”

“Not in the least. But I do know this; that not even a cave man in love with a cave woman—but it is too horrible to talk about.”

“And yet you say he is bent upon marrying you.”

“He said that I'd got to marry him; that I'd never see daddy again until we were safely man and wife; that he wouldn't stop at anything to make me take him and take him willingly.”

“That clears the air a bit,” I said. “I don't know any more than a goat what is to become of us here on this lonesome island or what we shall do when our food supply is gone, but I do know this, that when Wickham Jeffreys gets you in his power again it will be after I am too dead to bury. That's that. Now curl up there beside your woman and go to sleep. To-morrow may be a very busy day for all of us.”

“And you?” she asked.

“I shall sleep too, but not just yet. I'll put our fortress in a state of siege first.”

“Have I got to go to sleep?”

“You have. I'm the captain of this hooker—the pirate captain, if you please—and my orders must be obeyed. Good night.”

She put out her hand. “You're good, Dick; always good and dear and splendidly dependable. You came to-night like a special angel from heaven. Wo-won't you kiss me?”

Of course I did it, trying to make the kiss as cool and brotherly as it ought to have been since she had told me that there was another man who was the only one that had the right to kiss her any other way. But after it was done and the touch of her soft lips was burning itself into my very soul I told myself that there must be no more of this; that it must be strictly a case of touch not, handle not, for me. After which I went forward to rout out José and put him on guard, telling him of the presence of the women on .the schooner and of the Waikiki survivors on the other side of the island and of the new danger that threatened us in consequence. Having his assurance that he would call me instantly if anything untoward occurred I stretched myself on the bunched staysail to try for the sleep which the wonderful discovery and exciting experiences of the past few hours were threatening to postpone indefinitely.

Sleep came at last but not, however, until after I had sorted out some of the problems and possibilities. It was not difficult to find a starting point. Wickham Jeffreys as I knew him, spendthrift, loose liver, high roller, was not the man to grab off the methods of the bandit and the holdup artist unless there were some powerful motive to drive him. Discounting the argument he had used upon Alison—that her father was in danger of a prison sentence and that he, Jeffreys, was seeking to avert the catastrophe—it required no stretch of the imagination to postulate what I was convinced was the true state of affairs; namely that it was the Jeffreys, father and son, who were in danger of the prison sentence and that honest old Hiram Carter was the person who would do the sentencing unless some means were found of tying his hands. And what means could be more effective than the marriage of one of the criminals to the only daughter of the chief prosecutor?

With so much assumed it was not to be supposed that Jeffreys would quit simply because Alison and her maid had disappeared in the night. He would know that the two women could not get very far away and with the men of his party to help he would speedily comb the island for them. The only thing that might delay the search would be the lack of food; but this lack was going to be our own too, very shortly. True, there were coconuts on the trees and shellfish in the lagoon; Alison had told me that a scanty supply of both had been gathered by the Waikiki survivors during the day; but these were poor filling for white stomachs.

At this I remembered another thing that Alison had said; that the Waikiki was still above water on an offshore rock or shoal. There were doubtless plenty of provisions on board the yacht, out of reach for the boatless crew on the other side of the island but not out of reach for us. The Vesta's whaleboat was still firmly lashed in its chocks on top of our deck house, having come through the hurricane without being carried away and without damage. If the sea should remain calm, what was to prevent our sailing around the island and looting the wreck in our own behalf?

It was with this cheering thought in mind that I finally fell asleep; and it was broad day and the sun was peering over the island treetops at us when I awoke to find Dorgan standing over me. He was pointing aft and saying: “Hell's bells, pardner! Lookee what's been fetched us in the night!”

I looked and saw the two women still sleeping snuggled in the blankets.

“I brought them, Dorgan,” I said. “The yacht is wrecked on the other side of this island. I saw the light of a fire after you'd gone to bed and went over to investigate.” Then I told him briefly the circumstances, or enough of them to let him get hold of the situation.

“Well, I'm damned!” he commented. “Wouldn't that jar your back teeth loose? Hell's own hurricane for two days and nights and both ships blowed ashore on the same pin point o' land! Nobody'll ever believe it. What you goin' to do with them women?”

“We are going to keep them with us, of course.” Then I looked him in the eyes: “And, besides that, we're going to treat them as if they owned the earth and everything on it. Do you get that, Dorgan?”

“Huh! You don't need to say that to me; Isra'l Brill is the one you got to rub that into. I done told you what my mushy spot is. But Isra'l, he's another keg o' nails, he is.”

“I'll fix Brill,” I said. “Where is he?”

“Still corkin' it off in his bunk; looks like he's goin' to snooze the clock around. But what about these folk on t'other side? Do they know you've got the women?”

“They know it now—or at least they know they haven't got them. We'll likely have visitors before the day is over.”

“Peaceable?—or warlike?”

“Warlike, most probably.”

“All right. I've got one good arm and hand yet—if you reckon you could make out to trust me with a gun.”

I took the bull by the horns because I knew I'd have to sooner or later. “I'd trust you anywhere, Dorgan, if you gave me your word.”

“You can,” he remarked,shortly; adding: “Only you'd better not trust Isra'l. He'd do you up in a holy minute if you gave him a chance to get out of it with a whole skin.”

It was just here that the interruption broke in. Brill hadn't slept the clock around. I saw his red head and heavy shoulders coming up out of the companionway and heard his astonished whistle when his eyes lighted upon the women. Alison heard it, too, and started up like a scared wild creature. By that time I had run aft and was on the job.

“The least said is the soonest mended, Brill,” I snapped at him. “I'm the captain of this ship and this lady and her maid are my guests. So long as you treat them as my guests you'll live. When you forget you'll die. Go up forward and Dorgan will tell you what happened in the night.”

“Goodness!” said Alison with a little shudder. “What a dreadful face! Is he one of your kidnapers?”

“Yes; and that is the other up there by the foremast; the big man with the bandaged arm and head. Did you have a good sleep?”

She was stretching her pretty arms over her head.

“The best I've had in I don't know how many nights. Oh, but it's good not to have the nightmare, Dick!”

Her saying that gave me a thrill like the pricking of pins. Here we were stranded on an uninhabited islet and with a fair-to-middling prospect of starving before we were through with it and yet the misery she had been enduring had been so bitter that the present and prospective hardships seemed as nothing to her.

While she was speaking the Swedish young woman stirred, threw off the blanket and got upon her feet. Seen in daylight she was a magnificent specimen of the Scandinavian peasant type, generously large, not unshapely, with big blue eyes, a milk-white skin and a perfect mane of tow-colored hair which she was wearing in a thick braid down her back. She looked at me with a calm stare.

“Aye faight you las' night baycoose Aye tank you bane Mester Vickham,” she said slowly.

“That's all right, Hedda,” I returned laughing. “I couldn't let you make a noise, you know, and rouse the others.” Then I turned to Alison: “The cabin is yours, though you won't find much down there but a washbasin and some water. While you're gone I'll see what I can do toward getting breakfast.”

But here the daughter of vikings had her say: “You vait yoost liddle vile and lat dem breakfast vait, too. If you got somedings to eat I bane cook it for averybody.”

“Can she?” I asked Alison.

“I wouldn't put anything beyond Hedda. She is a treasure.”

While the women were below I went forward and joined Brill and Dorgan at the foremast. Dorgan was ready with a question.

“What's your lay when them dickies fr'm t'other side turn up?”

“If we're here we'll turn them down,” I replied.

“They'll want the women back?”

“Undoubtedly.”

“How many did you say there was of 'em?”

“There are eleven men in all—and five women.”

“Will the men fight?”

“If your bribe payer can make them—yes.”

“A little worse'n two to one; reckon we can stand 'em off?”

“We've got it to do—if we're here.”

“You said that afore—if we're here. Where else would we be?”

I pointed to the whaleboat.

“Miss Carter says the yacht didn't sink and that it hasn't gone to pieces yet. It is hung up on a reef or shoal on the other side of the island. The other people can't get to it because they have no boat. But we can.”

Dorgan grinned.

“We got a wreck of our own; whadda we want of another?”

“Your head must be hurting you again,” I said. “If the sea hasn't looted her completely the Waikiki has plenty of good food aboard.”

“You ride,” the big man chuckled. “I reckon I'm one o' them willies that has to have their heads chopped off afore they know 'at they're dead.”

Brill didn't say anything but he called José and Pedro and sent them aloft to rig a tackle for hoisting the whaleboat over the side; and he did it without cursing.

Some half hour later Hedda dished us up a breakfast which, though it made reckless havoc of our scanty larder stock was a vast improvement upon anything we'd had since the Vesta had left Miami. Dorgan, Brill and the sailors gorged themselves at the galley but Hedda served Alison and me on the break of the deck house. While we were eating I told Alison that our food supply was about exhausted and that if we couldn't renew it from the wreck of the Waikiki we'd soon be no better off than the yacht's survivors. This brought on more talk about our situation as castaways and the prospects for a rescue. Volney, the sailing master of the yacht, had been lost when the Waikiki struck and the first boatload of the panic-stricken went down, and from what Alison was able to tell me I gathered that there was no one among the survivors who could make even an intelligent guess as to the longitude and latitude of our island.

“Brill 'shot the sun' yesterday and he says our latitude is between nineteen and twenty degrees, north, which would put us well out of the track of the steamer lines,” I said. “Beyond that it is all guesswork. We are just somewhere in the Caribbean.”

“That sounds tragic, doesn't it!” she commented with a little shiver. “When the news gets out I suppose that will be the headline in the home newspapers: 'Lost,' the Private Yacht Waikiki—Somewhere in the Caribbean.' And when the food is all gone——”

“We won't borrow trouble from the future,” I hastened to say. “The Caribbean isn't as wide as the Pacific or even the Atlantic. Besides we are going to have trouble nearer at hand. I believe Jeffreys has the best of reasons for not wanting to lose you; a much more vital reason than the sham altruistic notion he was trying to make you swallow. Don't you?”

She nodded and said: “I wonder if we are thinking of the same thing, Dick?”

“That the penitentiary threat is really hanging over Jeffreys and his father instead of over your father?” I suggested.

She nodded again, saying: “Could it be that way?”

“I am pretty confident that it is that way. Everything points to it. I know positively that the two Jeffreys are as crooked as rams' horns; that was why I was fired last spring in Colorado—as a scapegoat to cover up some of their grafting. It says itself that if you were married to Wickham your father wouldn't prosecute; and if the Jeffreys are in a criminal hole—which seems likely—he'd pay them out of it and take the loss himself to save you from a scandal and disgrace. Haven't you ever considered it in that light?”

“I have,” she returned, which proved what I had always known—that she was much more clear-headed and logical than most young women who haven't had to go up against the grimmer realities of life.

“In that case we haven't heard the last of Wickham Jeffreys,” I went on. “You are his sheet anchor—his hope of salvation —and he isn't going to lose you without a struggle. What sort of a crew did you have in the Waikiki? Scoundrels, I should say, from what they did when the yacht struck.”

“Those that were saved were no better. You'd think they were hired ruffians from the way they act.”

“They probably are, and Jeffreys picked them for his purpose. This island is small and he'll comb it in his search for you and Hedda. When he finds this schooner and recognizes her he'll know what's happened and that you are with me. That will mean war. Wickham Jeffreys is not precisely the kind of material out of which buccaneers and bloody-handed pirates are made. But even a rat will bite when it is cornered.”

She looked at me wide-eyed.

“Are you trying to frighten me, Dick?”

“The Lord forbid! I am only trying to prepare you for what may happen. If Wickham and his gang find us, as they are morally certain to, there will be battle and murder and quite possibly sudden death. I'm going to dodge all this if I can, but if worst comes to worst——”

“I understand,” she broke in quite calmly. Then she repeated what she had said in the night: “You're good, Dick; always good and dependable. I think I am going to owe you more than I can ever repay.”

“Nothing like it!” I rejoined as lightly as I could, loving her as I did. “Now, if you are ready we'll disappear and at least postpone the evil day for a little while.”

Pedro and José had gotten the whaleboat over the side and around under the stem of the schooner and Brill had rigged a spare staysail boom for a stub mast with a lug sail. It seemed only the part of prudence to take what was left of our provisions, so I told José to empty the galley locker into the boat and to add a breaker of water drawn from the Vesta's fresh-water butt. The one important thing that I forgot to do—and the memory lapse was inexcusable—was to go down into the hold and get the arms and ammunition from their hiding place in the liquor cargo.

The seven of us made a fairly full load for the whaleboat but though there was a steady land breeze blowing there was no sea on and the lagoon was like a mill pond. When the Minorcans had set the tiny sail Brill took the steering oar and we shoved off. As yet there had been neither sight nor sound from the jungle but I was momently expecting both. I could easily picture Jeffreys' dismay and rage—not to speak of any uglier emotions—when he found that his safety anchor had been pulled up by the roots.

With the breeze coming off the land we had a fair sailing wind and the whaleboat behaved very well, making good time as we coasted along between the reef and the mainland. The coast line of the island on that side—on both sides, as we afterward learned—was somewhat irregular, being in dented with little bays and coves with blunt headlands to separate them, and it was just as we were rounding the first of these headlands and were getting our last glimpse of the beached Vesta that Alison laid a hand on my arm. “Look!” she whispered and when I looked I saw the beach at the schooner's bow suddenly dotted with the figures of men.

Dorgan saw them too and gave his wide-mouthed grin.

“I reckon we didn't crawl out none too soon,” he observed. And then: “Whadda you allow they'll do to the schooner?”

“Raid the cargo,” I prophesied; “do that and try to make your contraband answer for the food they haven't got.”

“Here's hopin' it'll p'ison the last one of 'em deader'n a nit!” said Brill bitterly; and then a twist of the steering oar sent us past the point of land and blotted out the distant view of the Vesta and her raiders.

CHAPTER IX.

THE LAST OF THE “VESTA.”

I was hoping very earnestly that the Jeffreys crew of searchers hadn't seen us. The tackle by which the whaleboat had been launched was sufficient evidence of the means of our departure, of course, but I thought there might be some small advantage accruing to us if the raiders didn't learn that we had just left and were hardly out of sight along the shore. On the other hand, if they had seen us and marked the crowded condition of our boat they would know that we couldn't venture very far from land.

As we went on we found the outer reef drawing nearer to the shore, finally coming to a place where the lagoon itself was so narrow and bestudded with the coral growth as to compel us to take to the open water beyond the barrier. Here the ground swell was pretty heavy but the whaleboat, even laden as it was, performed very well under Brill's skillful juggling and we were soon rounding the northeastern end of the islet and jibing to lay a course down its farther side.

In a short time we came in sight of the Waikiki. She was standing head toward the land, with a little list to starboard, and but for the leaning position might have seemed to be quietly at anchor. As we approached I scanned the shore through Brill's binoculars. There was no sign of life anywhere and I saw that one of the bay headlands shut off the view of the yacht from the camp the survivors had pitched in the glade. It occurred to me at once that here was another of the small advantages. Unless some of the campers should follow the beach around the headland our presence on the yacht would go undiscoverd.

To hold this advantage for what it might be worth I directed Brill to bring the boat up under the yacht's counter on the seaward side where it couldn't be seen from any point on the beach. This was done and the list of the yacht let us climb aboard with out difficulty. Once on the deck we saw that the sea had mishandled the smart little liner shamefully. The after-deck awning was gone and its iron stanchions were bent or broken. The lounge furniture, settees, lounges and chairs, were all gone of course, and the ornamental brass rail which had surmounted the ordinary wooden one had been carried away. The glass in the windows of the cabin had disappeared and the handsome gold-and-white dining saloon looked as if a crew of madmen had been holding an orgy in it.

Seeing all this wreckage, I supposed, of course, that the yacht's hold would be full of water; and, indeed we soon discovered that she had taken in a lot of it. Oddly enough the flooding was confined chiefly to the forward compartments of the hold, the bulkheading cross partitions having kept it from submerging the boiler and engine rooms. In the latter the water was only ankle deep over the floor; in the boiler space there was more—it had risen high enough to flood the grates.

Naturally, with the water six or eight feet deep in the forehold, we could not tell how much damage had been done to her under body at the bows when she struck; that is, whether or not she was stove and leaking. But there was reason to hope that her substantial steel skin was unbroken; a hope that was strengthened when we found that she was hung up on a sand shoal and not on a reef. For a pleasure craft she was built very stanchly and while her top works were badly knocked about, as they would be by the hammering of the giant seas breaking over her, she was by no means the total wreck we had been expecting to find her.

While Brill and Dorgan and I were looking the hull over Alison and the Swedish young woman investigated the pantry and storerooms. In these they found a plentiful supply of provisions, much of it still undamaged. So far as food was concerned there was subsistence for weeks, not only for us, but for the other castaways if we chose to divide with them. As to the dividing I fancy the same thought came to both Alison and me a little later when we were checking over the ample food stock.

“Those people on shore,” she said: “goodness knows, I have no reason to be especially generous to them. But it is rather dreadful to think of them starving on coconuts and shellfish when we have plenty of civilized food.”

“I was thinking of that, too,” I admitted. “For the sake of the women they have with them we'll find a way to divide; though as for Wickham Jeffreys I'd be quite willing to let him chew on the nuts and sea worms for the remainder of his days.”

“But how can you divide with them without running into danger?”

“Easily. We'll wait until after dark and then take the whaleboat and set a cargo of this stuff ashore. They'll find it if we leave it on the beach in plain sight.”

“We are going to stay here in the yacht?” she asked.

“It is the safest place for the present and while the weather holds good. Those people can't reach us without a boat; and besides, the wreck of the yacht will be much more likely to attract the attention of some passing vessel than will our beached schooner on the other side of the island.”

Throughout that day, during which we busied ourselves industriously in making the yacht habitable, cleaning up the storm mess, drying the bedding in the sun, and—José and I, at least—making a swimming pool of the forehold in an effort to find out if any of the bow plates had been started in the grounding, we saw no signs, of life on shore and I wondered if it hadn't yet occurred to Jeffreys or some of the others that we had forsaken the schooner for the Waikiki.

There was the hoisting tackle on board the Vesta to show that we had launched a boat and the hot galley stove to prove that the time of our departure must have very nearly coincided with that of their discovery of the schooner. But in these speculations I failed to consider one important factor, namely, the Vesta's cargo and the nature of it. As the event proved the finding of the liquor in the schooner's hold had been the introduction to a day-long carouse and it was this that gave us our temporary immunity. But of this, more in its place.

As may be imagined I did not let the “redding-up” of the dismantled yacht pause with the mere job of making it habitable for the time being. I did not need Brill's assurance that another storm, or even the threat of one, would, if the yacht remained in its present position, force us to take refuge on the island again. As the little ship lay on the shoal she would be swept by a very moderate sea, to say nothing of the danger of her breaking up. So with the two Minorcans to help and the whaleboat for a working stage I made a thorough examination of the hull on the outside, taking soundings all around and making rough measurements to ascertain just how badly we were stranded.

The results were rather encouraging. The shoal was much like a river sand bar and though the yacht was firmly embedded for ward there was deep water under her stern—five fathoms as we measured it with the lead line. I was confident that if she could be freed of the heavy burden of water in the holds there was an even chance that she might be floated.

Next, I overhauled the machinery. So far as I could determine this was all intact. Here again it was only the water that had come aboard that prevented its use and even with that handicap I thought we might still be able to bail the fire room and so be in shape to get steam on the boilers; enough, at least, to permit us to run the steam bilge pumps.

Summing up the total of these pryings for Dorgan and Brill I told them that if we had lost a schooner I was of the opinion that we stood a fair chance of finding a yacht. If all other means of rescue failed we could turn ourselves into a wrecking crew and try to get the Waikiki afloat.

“Huh!” sniffed Brill. “What you goin' to do with her if you do float her?”

“Go back to the world in her, of course!” I retorted.

“Where's your ingineer?”

“I can handle that end of it if you can take the bridge.”

“I dunno,” he grumbled. “I never sailed nothin' bigger than a coastin' schooner.”

“Well, if we get this baby in commission you'll never learn any younger how to handle a steamer,” I told him. “But that is a future. I have just remembered something that I ought never to have forgotten. You had some rifles and ammunition aboard the Vesta.”

“Yes; and by cripes, you took 'em out o' the cabin locker and hid 'em,” Brill complained.

“Ah?” said I; “you went after them, did you? That was what I expected and it was why I took them away. We've got to go back and get those guns.”

“What for?” It was Dorgan who wanted to know.

“Because they are high-powered rifles and we are not out of range from the beach. I don't know the temper of those men on shore or how far they will go, but I do know that their leader's one decent accomplishment is the ability to shoot straight. He was once a member of a crack rifle team in New York and I've seen him at the butts. He's an expert marksman.”

At this they both agreed with me that we'd have to go back to the schooner; Dorgan heartily enough and Brill morosely. And it was Brill, and not Dorgan, who objected surlily when I said we'd kill two birds with one stone and set some provisions ashore for the Waikiki's castaways while we had the whaleboat manned.

“I don't see no use a-doin' that,” he growled. “Let 'em starve, by grapples! If the shoe was on t'other foot they'd see us in hell afore they'd split with us. Besides, we may need all there is ourselves.”

At this Dorgan called him down savagely.

“You ain't fit to live on the same earth with human bein's, Isra'l,” he ripped out. “Ain't Cap'n Ainsley done told you they got wimmen with 'em? But you wouldn't mind starvin' a lot of wimmen, you wouldn't!”

The plans for the expedition were soon formulated. As soon as it grew dark we would load the boat with provisions, and blankets and clothing for the women, and let the two Minorcans row it ashore and un load it. That done we would sail around the head of the island and under cover of the darkness reconnoiter the Vesta. If the enemy were not in possession we'd go aboard and search for the weapons.

The first part of this program was carried out without incident. The boatload of stuff was taken ashore and piled up on the beach where in daylight it could not fail to be seen from the camp, and the two sailors pulled back to the yacht. For the descent upon the schooner I decided to take the two women along. Alison gravely offered to stay in the yacht with Hedda for a companion and there seemed to be little reason to fear that the two of them wouldn't be safe enough; but I was not taking any chances. So, with the same boat's company we had had in the retreat from the Vesta we set out to redouble the island head.

Of all the risks we had taken thus far, this voyage in the starlight along a reef-studded shore was perhaps the most hazardous. The land breeze of the forenoon had shifted to a sea breeze and that was in our favor; but while there was not wind enough to put the sea up there was a heavier ground swell than that we had encountered in the morning and in any hands less skillful than Israel Brill's I am convinced that the whale boat, driven by the clumsy lugsail, would speedily have come to grief in the breakers. As it was we had some pretty narrow escapes before we won to the shelter of the western lagoon; but we made it finally with no more than a few bucketfuls of water to slosh around in the bottom of the boat to remind us of the danger past.

Once in the lagoon and stealing along in the shadow of the beach-crowding jungle we began to look ahead to pick out the dark bulk of the Vesta. It seemed to me that we had gone fully twice the distance traversed in the morning before Brill suddenly put his steering-oar helm hard down and gave José an order that made the Minorcan quickly spill the wind out of our sail and so bring the whaleboat to a stand. In the distance we could hear voices, a confused medley of them as of men shouting. It was Dorgan who corrected that impression.

“Drunk and disorderly,” he chuckled. “They're still there and they're singin'. They can't break loose fr'm the booze.”

There was something inexpressibly weird and uncanny in the discordant racket that floated out to us upon the breeze; tuneless songs that were shouted rather than sung. I was sitting next to Alison in the boat, and I could feel her shudder of repugnance and disgust. “Beasts!” she said. “It was coming to that on the yacht, at the last. There were times when Hedda and I had to lock ourselves in our stateroom.”

At another order from Brill the two sailors got out the oars and pulled us slowly around the point of land that was cutting off our view of the Vesta's grounding beach. A single glance showed us that we were out of the picture so far as any chance of boarding the schooner was concerned. The drunken crew had built a fire on the beach, apparently with dry lumber chopped out of the vessel, and around it a dozen half-clad figures were reeling and dancing like a mob of crazy savages. And there were women in the whirling circle. Alison was shuddering again and she drew closer to me.

“Do you wonder that I was ready to walk into the sea last night?” she whispered shakenly; then: “And at home those people would call themselves civilized.”

Plainly we had no business on that side of the island; none whatever; and there was certainly nothing in this disgraceful spectacle of a lot of our fellow human beings gone mad to hold us. But when I would have given the order to retreat, or did give it, Brill hesitated.

“Wait a minute,” he urged. “Let's see what's comin' next.”

As he spoke the reeling figures around the fire began to snatch up blazing brands, whirling them over their heads as they danced. By the light of these waving torches we could see that they had made some sort of a plank runway from the schooner's deck to the sands. While we looked a single figure broke out of the whirling-dervish circle and flaming torch in hand ran up the plank gangway to disappear, torch and all, into the Vesta's hold.

“He's gone after more o' the Scotch,” said Dorgan and his guess was immediately confirmed when the hold diver reappeared with an armful of objects that we took to be bottles—but without the torch!

“Blast his soul!” gritted Brill. “He's gone and left that fire stick in the hold! That'll be the last o' the old Vesta!”

It scarcely asked for a prophet or the son of a prophet thus to foretell the result of the liquor carrier's negligence. While the maniacs around the bonfire were knocking the necks from the bottles a column of smoke began to pour up out of the schooner's hatchway. Nobody saw it or heeded it until the smoke column turned to a lurid pillar of flame to go licking up into the ship's rigging with a roar like that of a blast furnace. So far as anything could do so the spectacle sobered the maniacs for the moment, at least. Four or five of the men rushed up the gangplank to the schooner's deck but were immediately driven back by the violence of the flames.

Beyond this, two of them tried again, climbing to the deck and essaying to clap the hatch upon the spouting volcano; did get it part way on before the fire reached the alcoholic mixtures in the hold and began to explode them in jets and geyser bursts of many-colored flame. When that happened there was nothing more to be done and we could see the fire-illumined figures driven by the furnacelike heat stumbling and reeling along the beach in our direction.

It was our signal to vanish. Brill, cursing bitterly at the wanton destruction both of his vessel and her costly cargo, flung himself upon the steering oar and brought the boat around while the two sailors bent manfully to their job on the thwarts. A few quick strokes carried the whaleboat out far enough to let us get the breeze and the oars were shipped and the sail spread.

Looking back as we gathered headway we could see the whole heavens lighted balefully with the glare of the burning vessel, the red reflection of it reaching far out to sea. Nobody spoke until after Brill had negotiated the dangerous passages through the reef and we were once more swaying and swinging on the uneasy bosom of the ground swell outside. Then Dorgan said, with his hoarse chuckle: “All I'm hopin' is that they're burnin' up them rifles and that box o' shells along with the bug juice.” And I, for one, was fervently echoing the big man's pious hope.

In due time we reached the yacht and climbed aboard. From her deck we could still see the red glare in the sky. Whatever faint hope any of us might have been cherishing of making the Vesta carry us back to civilization was going up in smoke and flames: our only resources now were a water-logged yacht fast aground and an open boat.

CHAPTER X.

A THIEF IN THE NIGHT.

Though the Waikiki's electric-light plant was out of commission and would be until I could take time to overhaul it there were candles and ship's lanterns enough to give us what light we needed and after arrangements for the night had been made, with the Minorcans to take alternate watches of two hours each, I was making a round of the deck preparatory to turning in when Alison came out and joined me on the after deck. The red glow in the western sky was still undiminished and the reflection of it was strong enough to make the yacht stand out white and ghostlike in the rose-tinged night.

“You see now, Dick, what a beastly bacchanalian lot I sailed with,” she began. “I didn't know beforehand, and of course daddy didn't know when he wrote me to come down with Wickham's party what sort of people Wickham had invited.”

“Of course not,” I agreed; then: “In this letter you speak of, did he say he would meet you in Havana?”

“Yes; and I suppose he is there now, crazy with anxiety. He must know that the Waikiki cleared from Miami for Havana four days ago and that she hasn't been heard of since the hurricane.”

“Did he write from Havana?”

“No; his letter was sent from Puerto Barrios, Honduras.”

Ever since she had told me about the letter I had been wondering if it too might not be a part of Wickham Jeffreys' plot.

“I don't suppose, by any chance, you brought that letter with you, did you?” I asked.

“Why, yes; I think it is in my writing case in the steamer trunk.”

“Would you mind letting me see it?”

“I'll be glad to.”

I went with her as far as the main cabin and waited while she went into her stateroom and searched for the letter. When she brought it I was obliged to admit that it seemed perfectly genuine. It was typewritten on ordinary letter paper without any printed heading and though the paper bore the trade-mark of an American mill, that proved nothing. And the signature, the single word, “Daddy,” proved still less. It was written in Hiram Carter's familiar backhand and I doubted if even a handwriting expert would have questioned it.

It was not until I began to examine the inclosing envelope that the hopeful suspicion I had been cherishing raised its head again. The stamp and postmark were Hondurian, to be sure, though the date in the postmark was blurred so as to be entirely undecipherable. But it was the address that interested me most. At a casual glance there seemed to be nothing wrong with it; it was in typewriting, like the letter, and its three lines bore Alison's name, the Carter street and house number, and “New York City, U. S. A.” It was this final line that gave the clew. It was not quite parallel with the other two and it unmistakably was in a slightly different type.

“See here,” I said, holding the envelope nearer the candle. “Why do you suppose your father, or his Puerto Barrios amanuensis if he had one, used two different typewriters in addressing this?”

“The 'New York City' is different, isn't it?” she breathed, examining it closely. “What does that mean, Dick?”

I tore the back from the envelope and held the address face up before the light. At once the trick became as transparent as the paper upon which it had been turned. There had formerly been another address on the envelope and the first two lines of it had been erased and Alison's name and the Carter street and house number substituted. It has been said that the most careful criminal always misses a bet somewhere in the course of his undertaking. It would have been perfectly feasible to erase and rewrite all three lines of the address in which case the clew would have been buried. But the forger—Wickham Jeffreys or another—had slipped.

“It is a forgery,” I asserted, “just as I have been suspecting it might be. Whoever wrote this letter was obliged to have an envelope with the Hondurian stamp and postmark on it and since the Carter Company has a contract in Honduras any waste-basket in the New York offices of the company would furnish that. If you will look carefully you will see a faint shadow of the original address, which was to the company and not to you, under the typing of your name.”

She looked, saw, and gasped; but the gasp was of relief rather than of shocked astoundment.

“Of course it's a forgery!” she exclaimed. “How could I ever have imagined that daddy would write such a letter to me!” Then: “What unspeakable villainy! And yet in the light of what has happened since—— Oh, Dick! what would have become of me if you hadn't turned mutineer and pirate captain or if your ship hadn't been wrecked on the same island with the Waikiki!”

“It has all been mighty providential thus far,” I admitted. “But now you see how desperately the two Jeffreys must be involved. I am glad to know about this letter and to have my suspicion confirmed. Forewarned is forearmed. Having gone so far Wickham isn't likely to stick at anything now to make his plot go through.”

“But what can he do, when they have no boat?”

“I can't say as to that. But you may be sure we'll hear from him in some way as soon as he finds out that we are here in the yacht. He knows he can never go back to civilization unless he takes his hostage with him—and you are the hostage.”

The candlelight wasn't very good but I made sure her eyes were suspiciously bright when she turned to face me and put her hands on my shoulders and said: “I'm thanking God more and more for you every minute, Dick, dear!”

Of course I went clear off my head at that. If I have said anything heretofore to give the impression that I wasn't a human man like other men, it was a mistake. I was and am. Right there and then in that white-and-gold dismantled dining saloon I crushed her in my arms and kissed her until she was fairly gasping for breath. But swift upon the heels of the uncontrollable passion fit came repentance and remorse.

“Forgive me if you can, Alison,” I stammered. “I know what you meant, but—but it pushed me over the edge. I'm a cad, a brute—anything you like to call me, for I haven't forgotten for a single minute that you told me there is another man. Just the same, I've loved you ever since we were children together and it isn't my fault that your father's money came between us to keep me from telling you so.”

Blurting all this out most shamefacedly I stepped back prepared to take what was coming to me. But she didn't say any of the things I had given her a right to say. She had turned away and was covering her face with her hands and I thought she was crying. But there were no tears in her voice when she said softly, behind the shielding hands: “I—I think you'd better go away, now, Dick, and—and leave me. For—for, you see, I love that other man very madly and if he should ever find out what——”

I didn't wait to hear any more and shortly after I reached the deck I heard her stateroom door close behind her. Feeling more like a sheep thief than I had ever thought a man of my blood and breeding could feel I went aft to substitute a lock and chain for the whaleboat's rope painter, this purely on Israel Brill's account. His surly attitude kept me constantly suspicious of him and Dorgan's warning also carried weight. I knew Brill was charging the loss of his schooner and her cargo up to me, as in a way he was justified in doing, and I didn't doubt for a moment that he would sell us out if he could get in communication with Jeffreys and the bribe should be big enough.

After locking the boat I made one more round of the deck before going up to the bridge to turn in on the lounge seat in the chart house. In the bow I found José on watch and to my question he answered that he had neither seen nor heard anything stirring on shore. At the foot of the bridge ladder I came upon Dorgan smoking a pipe and nursing his splint-bound arm.

“Trouble?” I queried, halting to look him over.

“She's achin' like hell,” he returned, meaning the broken arm, “and I reckoned I might as well get up and smoke me a pipe.”

The big fellow's patience under his woundings made me feel uncomfortably conscience-stricken.

“I'm mighty sorry I broke your arm, Dorgan,” I said. “I didn't mean to cripple you as bad as that.”

“I ain't a-kickin', am I?” he returned good-naturedly. “It was a free-for-all and somebody had to get the worst of it. Besides, I ain't forgettin' that you lugged me up out o' the Vesta's cabin to give me a show for my life when we all thought she was goin' to Davy Jones. But about these cusses on shore. Reckon they got them rifles out o' the schooner afore they burned her?”

“Your guess is as good as anybody's,” I said. “But there's this about it—we'll probably find out in the morning. If they have the guns they'll be taking pot shots at us from the beach.”

“Say, lookee here,” he put in curiously; “you told me this mornin' that this here Jeffreys pup would try to get the wimmen back; is it bad enough to be a fight for blood?”

“It is just that. Unless Jeffreys can take Miss Carter back to the United States as his wife he can't go back himself.”

“Huh!” he said. “Reckon you could make that a little plainer?”

“It's a long story but I can give you the nib of it. Jeffreys and his father have been doing crooked work and Miss Carter's father is the one who can make them do time for it. But his hands will be tied if his daughter is married to young Jeffreys. That's the whole plot in a nutshell.”

“But he can't make the gal marry him if she don't want to.”

“He can make her wish she'd never been born,” I said and he took my meaning.

“Why, the damn' dirty hound!” he said. “If I could get holt of him with this one good hand o' mine——”

“I feel a good bit that way myself,” I cut in. “Maybe one or both of us will get a chance before the show is over. We'll be hearing from him shortly.”

Dorgan turned to scan the distant shoreline looming faintly in the darkness.

“That li'l' bird,” he said, meaning José; “I shouldn't wonder if he wouldn't be a good enough li'l' hellion in a scrap. But this here's a time when there ortn't to be nobody but a white man on watch—somebody 'at's goin' to be derned sure not to forgit and go to sleep. You tell José to turn in and I'll stand his watch and call you at midnight 'r so.”

It will be understood that I had no fear of treachery on Dorgan's part, by this time, so I gave the order as he suggested. And when I had seen the crippled giant begin a slow march back and forth between the bitts forward and the bridge ladder I climbed to the chart room and turned in, not doubting Dorgan's loyalty any more than I did my own.

When Dorgan awakened me I found that his “midnight or so” had stretched to the small hours of the morning.

“Anything stirring?” I asked.

“They're on,” he reported. “Couple of hours ago some of 'em come along with torches and found the stuff we put ashore. Looked as if they was luggin' it all off somewheres—back around the headland.”

“That settles it,” I said. “They know we're here—unless they think we've gone to sea in the Vesta's boat. It's a small matter. They'd know it anyway when we try to get steam on the yacht.”

“Reckon we can make out to do that?” he asked.

“We've got it to do,” I told him; whereupon I descended to the deck to take my turn at the sentry go.

It proved to be a lonely watch. Toward morning the thin sickle of a dying moon rose out of the sea and in the ghostly half light the yacht, the silvered sea, the white line of the beach and the background of dense tropical jungle figured as the stage setting in a weird spectacle, lacking nothing but the people of the play. What would the day now lingering just beyond the eastern horizon bring forth? Rather feverishly I fell to estimating or trying to estimate the time it would take to pump the yacht free of water—if we should be lucky enough to get steam on the boilers and set the pumps at work. And if we should succeed in getting the water out of her would the twin screws develop power enough to back her off the shoal? Only the trial actual would answer that question. A greater power than any man-made engines could develop had driven the steel hull into the sand; would the hurricane demons, looking on from whatever upper world to which they had withdrawn, laugh mockingly at our puny efforts to undo their work?

At the first graying of the dawn I took my stand in the sharp prow and swept the shore line with the glass. The red glow from the burning schooner had long since died out of the western sky and in all the wide prospect the grounded yacht alone spoke of the presence a of humankind or the works of man. As the beach line came into clearer view I was able to confirm Dorgan's report as to the removal of the supplies we had put ashore. They had all disappeared.

Just before sunrise I called Brill and the two sailors and tapped on the door of Alison's stateroom and asked her to wake Hedda, who had volunteered to serve as ship's cook. Taking a leaf out of the book of the probabilities I argued that the liquor orgy of the previous day, followed, as it doubtless was, by a gorging feast on the provisions we had put ashore, would make it pretty difficult for Jeffreys to get his forces in action until after the effects of the carouse had worn off. With one uninterrupted day I thought we might clear the fire hold of water; and with that accomplished we could put fire under the boilers and set the power pumps at work.

While Hedda was cooking breakfast I dropped into the engine room for another look at the machinery. Though I had taken the course in civil engineering in college and had majored in that branch I had always had a strong mechanical turn and on the one short voyage I had made in the Waikiki as a guest of the Carters I had spent most of the time in the engine room—gaining a bit of experience which was now about to prove invaluable. What would have been merely “gadgets” to other men—and to me, for that matter, if I hadn't previously made their acquaintance—were now parts of a familiar mechanism with which I had once eaten and slept.

As I have said before the machinery, or so much of it as I could get at with half a foot of water on the floor, seemed to be uninjured by the shock of the grounding; and after I had overhauled the bilge pumps and ascertained the possibility of getting steam to them without any hand bailing I climbed back to the deck and was just in time to meet Alison as she came out of the main cabin. If she had made me pay for my passionate outburst of the night by putting me in a class with Wickham Jeffreys, I couldn't have blamed her. But there was nothing in her greeting to show that she even remembered the outburst.

“I hope the pirate captain rested well,” she said, with the grimacing little smile that was always, for me, one of her most alluring charms. And then: “When do we sail?”

“I wish I could tell you,” I returned, trying, rather ineffectually I'm afraid, to match her cheerful mood, “but I can answer only in negatives. It won't be to-day.”

In a flash the cheerful mood vanished. “Poor daddy!” she said and her lip trembled; and then again: “Poor, poor daddy! It breaks my heart, Dick, to think how he must be suffering! And it may be days and days before we can get to him.”

“But, see here,” I said, trying to comfort her, “since that letter was a forgery, you don't know positively that he is in Cuba.”

“No; I only know that he said in a former letter that he would return by way of Cuba.”

“But that was indefinite as to time, wasn't it? And even if he has left Honduras and is now in Havana he may not have heard of the possible loss of the Waikiki and even if he has heard of it he has no reason to suppose that you were on board—inasmuch as he didn't write that letter you thought he wrote.”

“Oh, dear me! that is so,” she said with a deep sigh of relief. “I am still all tangled up and bewildered and I keep on forgetting. Of course he wouldn't know that I was in the yacht—at least not unless he has cabled to New York and found out in that way.”

“We'll hope he hasn't cabled and we'll also hope that we are going to float the Waikiki before Wickham Jeffreys thinks up some scheme to stop us.”

“Do you know anything more than you did last night?” she queried.

“Only that they have found the provisions and clothing and have carried them away from the beach. Which means that they know we are here in the yacht or have been here.”

“But they can't come off to us without a boat.”

“No,” I said.

We had been walking slowly aft as we talked, expecting momently to hear Hedda beating the gong to summon us to breakfast. At the taffrail Alison leaned over to look down at the water. When she turned to face me her lips were pale.

“Dick!” she gasped; “where is our boat?”

I sprang to the rail and looked over. The whaleboat was gone.

CHAPTER XI.

UNDER FIRE.

I think I had never before so fully grasped the meaning of the word “consternation” as I did when I looked over the rail and found that the whaleboat, the one thing which had given us our supremacy over a boatless enemy, had disappeared in the night. In whose watch, Dorgan's or mine, it had been taken we could not tell, but it was gone. Some member of Jeffreys' carousing crew had remained sober enough to swim off to the shoal and in spite of our vigilance had contrived to get away with the boat.

Immediately after breakfast, which in view of our loss was a silent and hurried meal, I drew Dorgan aside.

“You warned me to look out for Brill,” I began. “Did he have a hand in the theft of the whaleboat?”

Dorgan scowled. “I wouldn't put it a-past Isra'l—if he thought he could make anything by it. He's mighty sore over the loss o' the hooker and her cargo. What makes you think he's mixed up in this boat business?”

“Because yesterday I found a piece of chain and a padlock in the engine-room supply chest and last night before turning in I locked the boat to the yacht's rail. The lock and chain are both gone.”

“Put the key in your pocket?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Is it there now?”

“No.”

“Somebody frisked you in the night and I'm right much afeard it was Isra'l. If it was I don't get off none too easy, myself.”

“How is that?”

“Just a little while afore I went off watch and called you, Isra'l come paddin' round up for'ard in his bare feet, cussin' a few lines and sayin' he couldn't sleep for thinkin' over how much he'd lost in the schooner. Just as he was leavin' he asked whereabouts you'd bunked down and I didn't have no better sense than to tell him you was asleep up in the chart room.”

“I guess that explains it,” I said gloomily. “The loss of the boat probably means that we'll have a bloody fight on our hands, and if it comes to that I'll see to it that Brill is the first man on the yacht to stop a bullet!”

Just what Brill's part in the theft of the boat had been we never learned. Probably the man who had swum off to the yacht had convinced him that Jeffreys would make it worth his while to steal the key; and quite as probably the reason why Brill had not gone with the boat was that the ambassador thought a friend aboard the yacht would be more valuable to Jeffreys than another hand ashore.

Not to lose any more of the time which had now become precious, the job of bailing the fire hold was started at once. Under my directions José and Pedro rigged a snatch-block hoist on the small crane used normally to hoist ashes out of the firing pit. Under the beak of this crane an inclosed shaft ran down to the fire room, and the steel ash hopper was made to serve as a bailing bucket.

In the division of labor I sent the two sailors below to fill the bucket and gave Brill the hot end, making him man the crank of the crane-hoisting drum. At first he wasn't going to do it, exploding in an eruption of rabid profanity and swearing that, he'd die before he would tackle a roustabout's job for me or anybody. But when I pulled the old army pistol on him and told him shortly that he might have his choice at once, he grabbed the crank and proved conclusively that he was not yet ready to die.

I confess I got a good bit of malicious satisfaction out of the next hour and a half or so, during which time Brill toiled and sweated at the crank of the ash hoist. Since there was no room for two men on the crank I contributed my moderate share to the job by dumping the water-filled hopper as it came up, chinking in the intervals of hoistings and lowerings with haste-prompting tongue-lashings designed to make the crank winder sweat still more profusely.

In the course of time and much sooner than I expected José called up to say that the water was below the firing stands, and Brill staggered away from the windlass, cursing bitterly and saying he would kill me for this when his chance came. As he shuffled away Dorgan came aft to say that there were men on the beach and that they seemed to be trying to signal the yacht.

Shouting down to José to tell him to build fires under the boilers I went forward with Dorgan. We had scarcely shown ourselves in the bow of the yacht before a bullet whined overhead and smacked into the woodwork of the bridge some second or two before the report of the gun came to our ears.

“That answers our question about the Vesta's rifles,” I said, propping out of sight behind the bulwarks and dragging Dorgan down with me. “You remember what I told you about that fellow's shooting. He'll get the range in the next trial or so.”

“I reckon we ain't got no partic'lar business up for'ard, nohow7,” Dorgan remarked, beginning to crawl back on his knees and one hand. “Here's hopin' this play boat's bow platin' is thick enough to stop a rifle ball.”

Of course the hull plating was armor plate to rifle bullets at long range but the bulwarks were not. The next shot came through less than three feet above the deck level, struck the iron capstan, glancing off to bite a piece out of the ladder leading to the bridge. As the yacht was lying head on to the island and with her bow lifted by her position on the shoal, only the bridge and some portion of the forward deck were exposed to a direct fire from the low shore; and as Dorgan said, we had no particular business in that part of the ship at present.

Hastening aft I warned Alison to keep under cover, explaining that the guns we had hoped were burned in the Vesta had evidently been salvaged.

“What is Wickham trying to do—murder us all?” she asked.

“He would probably be glad to murder everybody but you and Hedda. But we are safe enough so long as he shoots from the beach. Keep your woman under cover and stay there yourself.”

“But you and your men?” she protested.

“Our job is below for the present. Dorgan will keep watch for us and nothing can happen unless they use the whaleboat and try to board us. And they'll hardly venture that in daylight.”

By this time José and Pedro had their fires started and the black smoke was pouring from the yacht's tall funnel. Descending to the fire room I found that there was water enough in the boilers to make them safe until we could get steam to pump with. Beyond this there was a trying interval of waiting for the steam pressure to rise. Starting upon cold water it seemed as though the roaring fires in the furnaces would never take hold.

Knowing Jeffreys fairly well, and the lengths to which he had already gone, I did not underrate his shrewdness or the measure of his desperation. He was in the situation of a man who had burned all his bridges; and the smoke pouring from our funnel was serving notice upon him that what he did he must do quickly. Time and again as I came up from anxiously watching the steam gauges I cautioned Dorgan, keeping a lookout from a safe shelter on the hurricane deck, not to let any movement on shore escape him.

Beginning with the shot that had told us he was armed Jeffreys had fired a few rounds in rapid succession and after that he kept up a desultory fire, perhaps one shot every five or ten minutes; just often enough to let us know that any one of us showing himself would get his quietus. But as yet there had been no move made to bring the whaleboat around from wherever they had it hidden.

Since even a watched pot will boil if it be watched long enough the gauges finally showed sufficient pressure to enable us to blow the fires; and after that it was only a short time until I was able to start the bilge pumps. Half an hour, with both of the big pumps delivering full streams outboard, sufficed to drain the after hold and engine-room sump, and then I turned the pumping battery on the compartments forward of the fire room and coal bunkers.

At noon, while Jeffreys still kept up his irregular popping at us from the distant beach, Hedda, calm-eyed and apparently altogether undisturbed by the battle conditions, fed us on the job, carrying food and hot coffee not only to the sailors in the fire room but also to Dorgan on watch on the hurricane deck. Alison brought my dinner down to me in the engine room and her own with it, so we ate together to a thumping accompaniment from the laboring pumps. Like Hedda, my dear girl was perfectly cool and collected; she even wanted to know if I wouldn't let her relieve Dorgan at his watch, saying that we mustn't forget that the big man was still suffering from the broken arm.

“Dorgan wouldn't hear to it,” I replied; then I told her about the wife he had left behind in Jacksonville and how he had made me his executor when we thought the Vesta was going to be lost in the storm.

“That shows just how much good there may be in the worst of us,” she said. “He looks like an ogre and talks like one, but I'd trust him. The other man is the one I'm most afraid of.”

“Brill? He is bad—with the hopeless badness of a complete coward. I'd throw him overboard and make him swim ashore if we were not going to need what he knows about navigating a ship.”

“If we get off, will you trust him to navigate the Waikiki?”

“Not without somebody to hold a gun on him, you may be sure. He picked my pocket last night when I was asleep in the chart room and stole the key of the whale boat for whoever it was that got it. I'm not certain that it wouldn't have been a good riddance if he had gone ashore with the thief.”

Silence through the eating of another of Hedda's deliciously browned biscuits, and then: “Are you going to be able to float the Waikiki, Dick?”

“That is still on the knees of the high gods. So far as I can tell the hull is sound and the pumping will take an enormous weight out of her. But, after all, we may not be able to move her with the engines.”

“How soon will you know?”

“José says the water is going down pretty fast in the forehold. We ought to be able to try our luck by the middle of the afternoon.”

“Will it take long, after you begin?”

“That too is on the knees of the gods.”

“What will you do if you fail?”

“Try again and keep on trying.”

“But when it comes night——”

“I know. Jeffreys will fill the boat with his ruffians and try to board us—at least that is what I'd do if I were in his place. In that case we fight.”

“But they are armed.”

“So are we,” I said; but I didn't tell her that all the arms we had were the two revolvers I had taken from Brill in the capture of the schooner and that all the ammunition we had were the six cartridges in each of the big pistols.

“Bloodshed!” she said, with a little shiver.

“If they will have it, yes. And that brings us to something else. If we are lucky enough to float the yacht and get away in her I shall have no scruples whatever about leaving Jeffreys and the men of his outfit on the island until we can send somebody to take them off. But the women—the Waikiki belongs to your father and you are his representative. Whatever you say is what we shall try to do.”

“I don't owe that miserable lot anything at all—not even Peggy Sefton,” she said. “Of course if we could take them without running any additional risk—but I hardly see how that can be done.”

“Nor I,” I agreed. “But we'll see when the time comes.”

As I had predicted it was mid-afternoon before the bilge pumps sucked dry to tell us that the yacht was free of water. Waiting only long enough to let the two Minorcans clean their fires and get a good head of steam on I started the yacht's engines in the reverse motion, letting them turn over slowly until they were thoroughly warmed up. Then I opened the throttles to full speed astern and held my breath. For five minutes, ten, fifteen, the twin screws thrashed and turned and churned, but there was no movement of the ship. The sand still held us in its grapple.

Shutting off the power at last and telling José to bank his fires, I went on deck. Dorgan met me at the ladder hatch, shaking his bandaged head.

“She never budged an inch,” he said. “What's next?”

“The next thing is to shift every movable pound of weight aft. Where's Brill?”

“Search me. I ain't seen him since you turned him loose fr'm windin' that winch crank this mornin'.”

Calling José and Pedro up from the fire room I set them at work carrying every weighty thing they could lay hands on to the after part of the ship. Then I went in search of Brill and found him snoring peacefully in one of the bunks in the sailors' quarters. A hearty kick brought him up standing with a yell and an oath but before he could mouth the second oath I was running him out at the point of the pistol and shoving him into line with the two Minorcans. Then I got in myself.

It would say itself that in a well-ordered pleasure yacht there wouldn't be many movables apart from the pig-iron ballast in the hold, and while we were shifting the pigs I was cudgeling my brain to think of some expedient to loosen the grip of the shoal. In the mad haste of the moment—haste made madder when Dorgan came stumping down to tell us that the shore people had brought the whaleboat around and were piling into it—I thought of the water-jet device used by bridge builders in sinking piles or a caisson in sand. There was a small fire pump in the engine room and with time in which to connect lines of piping—and immunity from the nagging rifle fire while we were about it—it seemed that such a contrivance might be made to loosen the sand around the hull. But as it now appeared, time was going to be denied us.

It was not until Dorgan came a second time to tell us that the whaleboat, filled with men, had shoved off from the beach that I gave the order to stop the ballast shifting.

“On deck—you and Pedro!” I shouted to José and followed them up the ladder, driving Brill ahead of me.

When we got out to where we could see, Dorgan's report was confirmed. The loaded boat had left the beach but it was not coming directly toward us; it was steering to the right and the men manning the oars were not hurrying. With the glass we could count the occupants. There were six of them; four at the oars, one steering and the sixth man appeared to be kneeling in the bow of the boat. While we looked a faint puff of gray smoke broke out from the whaleboat's bow and the only whole pane of glass left in the Waikiki's chart room fell out in a tinkling shower of fragments.

At this Jeffreys' purpose became disquietingly obvious. He meant to circumnavigate us at a safe distance, pecking at us with his rifle fire from many different angles. He doubtless guessed by this time that we had no guns with which to answer him; knew also that if he could get astern of the yacht in a position where the seaward inclination of the hull would favor instead of baffling him he could drive us all below and hold us there while his oarsmen made the boarding dash.

It was a shrewd maneuver, holding, every promise of success. As the laden whaleboat swung slowly in its circling course the crack and smoke puff came at regular intervals from her bow and our exposed after-deck lounge speedily became uninhabitable. To put them beyond any possible danger from the flying bullets I sent Alison and Hedda down to the engine room, which was below the water line, and the five of us who remained took refuge in the cabin, Brill groveling on the floor in a ridiculous and contemptible agony of terror as the bullets came tearing through the upper body of the cabin. As the fusillade gave us leave Dorgan and I kept the movements of the whaleboat in view, expecting momently to see its bow turn toward us and the four slowly swinging oars dig for the attacking dash.

But the dash did not come. It was my guess that Jeffreys could not screw the nerve of his hired ruffians to the sticking point. I was quite ready to absolve him from any particular charge of bloodthirstiness in his persistent rifle practice. He had two perfectly defensible objects in view—defensible from his standpoint; one was to reclaim his hostage in the person of Alison. Carter and the other to regain possession of the yacht now that our firing of the boilers had made it evident that she was whole and might be floated. Doubtless he fancied he could wear us out by keeping us under the incessant strain and that eventually we would give up and signal him to come aboard. Be this as it may the circling course was held until the circle was completed; and when the long and nerve-wracking bombardment paused our damage proved to be strictly material. The bulwarks and top works of the yacht were punctured and bored in every direction but nobody had been hit, even by flying splinters.

Dorgan was growling sourly as we emerged from the riddled cabin.

“I sure reckoned they was goin' to give us a chance at 'em that time,” he complained. “This everlastin' popgun business is gettin' on my sore nerve!”

“It is clouding up,” I pointed out. “It will soon be too dark to let him see his gun sights.” Then as untechnically as possible I outlined my plan of trying to free the yacht by the use of high-pressure water jets directed into the sand around the bow.

“Water pipes?” he said. “How you goin' to work 'em? You got to have light to do it by and if there's light enough for us there'll be light enough for that skunk on the beach to see to shoot by.”

There was much truth in that but it was a case of nothing venture, nothing have. In the matter of light we had all we wanted below decks, and could have had it above if we had dared use the searchlight on the bridge. During the bilge pumping I had taken time to overhaul the electric plant and put it in order, and now as the clouds thickened to darken the heavens I started the dynamo and by the light thus furnished we began to whip things into shape for the force-pump experiment.

Considering it afterward I was surprised and humiliated to remember that I clung so desperately to the water-jet expedient when a much simpler and more promising one lay ready to our hands. But obsessions are curious things, amounting at times to a mild species of insanity. With the feverish persistence of a single-track mind I ransacked the yacht for material with which to construct the necessary line of piping and was forced finally to eke it out with splicings of fire hose.

And when the thing was done—which was not until long after the cloud-thickening darkness of an approaching storm had been made Stygian by the coming of night—and the force pump was started, the experiment was a sorry failure. In the first place the small force pump would not supply enough water to fill the various nozzles and in the second, When we sought to substitute pressure for quantity the various patched-up couplings wouldn't hold it. And while we were still working and sweating over the botch job, the Minorcans and I, with Dorgan standing by to do our swearing for us, Alison came running to tell us that trouble of some sort was brewing again; that the men on the beach had built a small fire and by the light of it they seemed to be manning the whaleboat.

Now a night attack, when the attackers might hope to get within grappling distance of us without being seen, was what I had been expecting—and dreading. If Jeffreys could whip all the men members of his party, guests and sailors, into line and crowd them into the whaleboat they would outnumber us two to one; or rather vastly more; since Dorgan had only one arm and there was no reason to suppose that Brill could be made to fight, even with Dorgan's pistol or mine to put the fear of death into him.

Menaced by the double danger of an attack from the island and the still more terrifying threat of the coming storm which would surely complete the wreck of the stranded yacht, swift escape seemed to be the only hope for us; and it was then, at the eleventh hour so to speak, when there was no time to put it into effect, that the simple expedient I have spoken of, or the conception of it, came crashing into my brain like the bolt from a crossbow.

“Dorgan!” I cried. “We ought both to be bored for the hollow horn! The anchors!”

CHAPTER XII.

STORM AND CALM.

“Whadda you mean—anchors?” said Dorgan. “I reckon I don't get you.”

“Don't you see?” I burst out. “With two anchors hanging at the bows we haven't had sense enough to carry them aft, drop them astern and put the steam capstan to the cables. And now these devils won't give us time to do it. But, by Heaven, we can try!”

That was the signal for a frenzied outburst of labor that put all our former toilings to shame. The Waikiki's anchors were of the modern stockless type, cut-down models of those with which the big liners are equipped, and they were extra heavy for the yacht's tonnage. There was only one way to carry them aft and that was by means of a float of some sort buoyant enough to support the weight, together with the drag of the cable as it should be paid out through the hawse hole at the bow.

Like most pleasure craft of her size the yacht had a life raft in her safety equipment, and luckily this had not been carried away when she struck the shoal. It was the work of a few minutes only to cut the lashings and put the raft over the side. Very coolly and courageously Alison took her place at the bow to watch for us, while José and Pedro and I towed the raft into position under the starboard anchor, with Brill, driven to it by the threat of a pistol in Dorgan's good hand—Dorgan's, mind you—riding the float to guide it to its place and hold it steady while we lowered the anchor upon it.

Though we were working in darkness—not daring to show a light on deck—the first half of the undertaking went through without a hitch. Though there was no wind as yet there was an ominous increase in the ground swell and this made Brill's part of the job, holding the raft in place while we eased the anchor down upon it, rather perilous. Nevertheless the thing was accomplished successfully and the raft proved to be buoyant enough to support not only the weight of the anchor but Brill's weight in addition; so we made him stay aboard to fend off as Pedro and I, with Hedda the strong to help, towed the tittuping float aft, José paying out the cable through the bow hawse hole as we went. Along toward the end the drag of the increasing length of cable was terrific and I doubt if we could have made it if Dorgan had not come to tail in on the towline.

Under compulsion—still under compulsion, as always—Brill tilted the raft and let the anchor slide into the deep water beneath the stern; then under the same sort of persuasion he handed the floating platform around under the yacht's overhang so that we might tow it forward on the port side. While we were hurriedly taking the lashings off the port anchor to repeat the process with it Alison broke in upon us, shaking with excitement.

“They are coming!” she announced breathlessly. “I can't see a thing—they've put their fire out—but I can hear the oars in the rowlocks!”

“Get below!” I ordered, “and take Hedda with you!” but I could not stop to see that she obeyed. If the whaleboat was on the way our time was short indeed. “Lower away—quick!” I snapped at José, who was handling the cable with the forward bitts for a snubbing post, and it was at this critical conjuncture that the quick-witted little man's dexterity failed him. In some manner the cable got away from him and the heavy anchor dropped like a plummet.

There was a splintering crash as the anchor fell upon and demolished the raft, a gurgling imprecation from Brill as the sea swallowed him and the catastrophe was a fact accomplished. As will readily be seen this accident left us in worse case than we were before. In addition to being stranded the yacht was now solidly anchored, fore and aft. And a low murmur on the windless air told us that the threatened storm was coming.

During the toiling interval in which we had been trying to make the water-jet expedient work we had kept the fires going under the boilers, and it was a hoarse roar of steam from the safety-valve escape pipe that drove me into action. I thought it might be barely possible that by winching on the one anchor astern, and adding the sternward pull of the twin screws, there was still some small chance that we might claw off the shoal before it was too late. While Pedro was throwing a line to Brill spluttering and swearing in the water under the bows I put Dorgan in command.

“I'm going to try to pull her with the single anchor,” I said, shouting to make myself heard above the raucous bellowing of the escape pipe. “Have José and Pedro throw a few turns of the cable around the capstan and be ready to take in when I put the power on. Let the other cable go slack so it can pay out if she starts. Knock Brill into it, too, if he's fit to do anything after he's fished up.”

“Aye can halp, too,” said a voice at my ear and then I saw that Hedda had not gone aft to the cabin with her mistress.

“Good girl!” I applauded; “it'll take all the hands we can muster. Jump to it—everybody!” And then I ran aft to go down to the engine room to do my part with the machinery.

In the excitement of the moment I had temporarily forgotten the other menace—the approach of the whaleboat. Now as I was running down the port side between the raised deck and the rail I thought of it and wondered if Jeffreys would have the steady nerve it would ask for if he should try to board the yacht in the rising sea which was already gurgling in the scuppers on the down-tilted side of the vessel and also in the face of an approaching storm. I was telling myself that he hadn't any such nerve when above the noise of the escaping steam and the whistling of the mounting wind in the wire rigging overhead I heard my name called; just two ear-piercing words: “Oh, Dick!”

As well as if I could have seen her peril I knew what those two words meant. They were a call for help and three bounds took me to the companion stair. In two more I was in the storm-battered white-and-gold dining saloon which was lighted by the single incandescent bulb—the only remnant of the ceiling electrolier I had been able to restore in my overhauling of the electric plant.

Withdrawn into the farthest corner of the room Alison was facing a man who had laid his rifle aside to have both hands free and as I burst in I heard him say: “Stop that shrieking and come along with me! If Ainsley interferes again I'll kill him! Don't you know there's a storm coming and the yacht will go to pieces in it? Come on, I say—if you make me put my hands on you what else——”

That was as far as he got. In a white-hot fury I forgot the perilous situation of the yacht and the fact that every moment's delay made it more perilous; forgot everything but the one blood-boiling urge to slay this damnable plotter who had stolen a march on us and was threatening the woman I loved.

“Turn around and put your hands on me!” I shouted; and when he whirled to face me I saw that he was no longer the debonair, smooth-shaven idler who had coldly pronounced the sentence of exile upon me in the lobby of the Brown Palace in Denver; gaunt, haggard and with eyes ablaze, with the jaunty yachting flannels hanging in rags, he looked more like an escaped convict cornered and ready to fight to the death.

“I said I'd kill you and I will!” he cried and sprang for the gun he had laid on the cabin table. But before he could snatch it up I had swept it aside and we clinched and went down together.

It is curious to note how the primitive in human nature asserts itself when that most primitive of all springs of action, the defense of the woman beloved, comes into play. Burned, blasted, devastated with a mad desire to kill Wickham Jeffreys as a fit ending to the struggle; blind and oblivious to all the humaner promptings; I was obsessed by the savage and most un-Christian idea that I must first gouge out the eyes that had dared to look upon my love, and tear out the tongue that had threatened her, and cripple the hands that were to have been laid upon her in desecration—mere bedlam madness of passion, all this, but it sufficed to make me forget the revolver thrust under my belt which I might have drawn and clubbed and with a single blow ended the maniacal struggle on the cabin floor.

But if I was forgetting the weapon, Jeffreys wasn't. From the instant of the clinch and fall he had been trying to get hold of it and as we rolled over and over in the death grapple he continued to try. Let me say here and now that I hold no grudge against him for what he did. He was fighting for his life and he knew it. I had beaten the mouth of threatenings, and stuck a thumb into one of the offending eyes, and was cracking the bones of one of the sacrilegious hands when with the fingers of the other hand he found the butt of the revolver. Berserk as I was I still had sense enough to try to twist aside when I felt the muzzle of the pistol pressed against my body. Then came the ear-deadening crash of the explosion and Jeffreys tore himself free and sprang to his feet.

I was hit and I knew it but even if the wound had been a fatal one I think that the mad rage still possessing me would have enabled me to leap up, as I did, and to fling myself at him. But he did not wait for the second grapple, nor did he fire again. With a cry that was like the snarl of a wounded animal he flung the pistol at my head and dashed up the companion steps in flight; and with the battle madness still sustaining me I was fairly at his heels when he tumbled over the rail into the whaleboat which, in the rapidly roughening sea, two of the Waikiki's sailors were striving to hold in its place at the yacht's side.

What happened after that fills only a hazy spot in my memory. Whether I saw the whaleboat swept away from the side on the crest of a sea, or only knew that it must be swept away when the men in it loosed their hold on the yacht's rail, I cannot say. Out of the thickening cloud which seemed to be settling down upon my brain and blotting out even the details of the late savage struggle in the cabin there emerged only one fixed impulse: I had started for the engine room to set the machinery in motion and thither I must go before the storm which either was, or seemed to my distorted brain to be, already bursting upon us in blinding flashes of lightning and deafening crashes of thunder, should annihilate us.

How I ever got down into the yacht's engine room I do not know, but at the next emergence from the thickening mental cloud I found myself opening the throttles to start the engines in the reverse and working the trampling machinery up to full speed astern. When the steel hull was humming and vibrating to the powerful backward thrust of the twin propellers, another blank intervened, and at a second lucid interval I discovered with a sort of bewildered amazement that I was manipulating the valves and levers of the steam anchor capstan, quite mechanically, as it seemed, and with no clear idea of what I was doing it for.

Once more the cloud curtain shut down and I knew no more until the stroke of a gong in the closely shut-in space spurred me alive. Clang-clang it went, and almost at once, clang-clang again. Like a child whose ears have been boxed to make him pay attention, I realized dumbly that the summons was for me; that the double clang repeated was the signal for full speed ahead. Clumsily, because my hands seemed to be all thumbs and singularly useless, I spun the throttle wheels, pulled the reversing lever over into the go-ahead position, and reopened the throttles. And after that, the curtain came down and stayed down.

Coherence, or consciousness, or whatever you like to call it, came next when I opened my eyes and found them staring blankly at a white ceiling that seemed to be rocking gently and slowly endwise. Next I saw that the sun was shining in upon the foot of the brass bed in which I was lying; looking in through a round port which stood open and through which I could hear the swish and die away of swiftly passing wavelets.

Not until after I had marked the swaying ceiling and the sunshine did I realize that my body seemed to be gripped in an iron corslet; gripped and held immovable. But my head was still free and though it asked for an effort mightier than that exerted by old Atlas carrying the world on his shoulders I contrived to turn it on the pillow.

“Don't, dear; don't try to move,” cautioned a low voice from somewhere in the room and then I saw her dimly, standing beside the bed; and presently a gentle hand was slipped under my head to help me to roll it back straight—a task which I felt wholly unable to master by myself.

“What's happened to me?” I demanded querulously. “Why can't I see any better?”

She was sitting on the edge of the bed now and she had one of my hands and was stroking it.

“It is just weakness, Dick, dear. You nearly bled to death before Dorgan and José found you in the engine room. Didn't you know that Wickham shot you?”

By the supremest effort I was able to remember that much.

“Yes; but after that?”

“After that you went down into the engine room and did all the things you meant to do—and you fairly dying on your feet! But it was just like you.”

“Did I—did we get the yacht off the shoal?”

“It was just as you planned it. The one anchor held and pulled us off, and then Brill unshackled the cables and let them both go. We were just in time. A few minutes later, just after the yacht's head was got around to meet it, the storm came. But we ran out of it in the night.”

“When was all this?” I asked feebly.

“Night before last.”

“And where are we now?”

“A few miles off a point of land which Brill says marks the entrance to Bahia Honda on the northern coast of Cuba. He says we'll be in Havana harbor before dark.”

“But I don't understand!” I protested weakly. “Who is running the yacht?”

“Dorgan is first mate and chief engineer. He says he doesn't know a thing about the machinery but you set it going and all he has had to do was to keep it oiled and keep water in the boilers and fire under them. José has helped a lot, too. It seems he was once a fireman for a time on a Spanish merchant vessel.”

“And Brill has the bridge?”

“Yes; and he's been just like a lamb ever since he came so near being killed by the falling anchor. I haven't heard him swear once.”

“All right,” I said, whispering because there wasn't strength enough left in me to make a real voice noise. “All's well that ends well. You don't have to marry Wickham Jeffreys, at any rate; and that's the main thing.” Then: “Alison, dear, I think the 'other man' owes me something; don't you?”

“What other man?”

“The one you're going to marry some time, you know; you haven't told me his name.”

“But I did tell you that he doesn't care for me.”

“Are you sure he doesn't?”

“I thought I was sure of it when I told you so.”

“But now?”

“But now I know he does care and—and—oh, Dick! you mustn't die! And you must forget all about daddy's money—which isn't mine and maybe never will be! Haven't you known, all along, that you were the 'other man?'”

Truly I was more than half dead but I should have had to be altogether dead and in my coffin if I hadn't been able to reach up and pull her down beside me. And it might have been two minutes, or five, or half an hour later when she said:

“You mustn't, Dickie, dear: I l-like your arms, but if you strain yourself and make your wound start bleeding again—it isn't bandaged very well.”

“Who bandaged it?” I asked, knowing well the answer I wanted to hear.

“I did. I don't know much about such things but I did the best I could. There was iodine in the yacht's medicine chest and I used a lot of that.”

“How bad is it?”

“Oh, it's an awful thing! The bullet went all around your left side and came out at the back. It was wicked—wicked!”

“Oh, I don't know,” I said. “Jeffreys was getting his when he did it. If he isn't a one-eyed cripple with false front teeth from now on it won't be through any fault of mine. I tried to pay him all that was coming to him from you and your father, with something on my own account, while I was at it. But let's forget him and the island where he and his crowd are safe to stay until we send for them, and talk about something else. What's worrying me is what your father will say when we—when I tell him that his daughter has fallen in love with a common, everyday, shot-up construction engineer.”

But I needn't have worried about that. When we reached Havana and found that good old Father Hiram was actually there after all—having just arrived from Honduras—and I had been carted to a hospital, and all the crooked tangles had been straightened out, I suddenly found myself made vice president of the Carter Construction Company, with power to act—or at least such was to be my status after I was well enough to make the journey in the Waikiki back to New York.

“We're going to have a hard job of it, Son Dick, putting the old company back on its feet after all the robbery and crookedness that's been going on,” was the way the dear old citizen put it up to me the day he came to my room in the hospital to tell me what was what. And then he added: “I owe you a lot more than a share in the business, my boy. If it hadn't been for you——”

I laughed as heartily as my sore side would let me.

“For me, and Dorgan, and the unwilling bootlegger skipper, and the two Minorcans, and the old Vesta, and a whaling lot of miracles thrown in for good measure!” I qualified. “And that reminds me; I want to do something for Dorgan and the two Minorcans; and while Brill was half a scoundrel, through it all, I wouldn't mind including him.”

“They are all here, waiting under pay, until you can get up and tell them what you want them to do and be.”

“That's fine!” I said. “Dorgan and Brill are both jolly pirates, but we can use them on some decent job, I'm sure. Perhaps you even would be good-natured enough to make a start by chartering a boat and sending them to take Jeffreys and his party off the island. Of course we don't owe Jeffreys anything like a good turn, but there are women with him——”

“I've been thinking about that,” interrupted the fine old boy. “I'll do it—with the hope of never seeing Jeffreys again.”

“As for the two Spaniards, they're pure gold,” I said.

“I'll take good care of them,” he remarked, smiling.

“That settles it all but what you said about owing me; there's no owing business about it, Father Hiram,” I continued. “Hasn't Alison told you she's going to marry me? That makes me your poor debtor and hers, a thousand times over.”

“All right, Richard—if you think so,” was the quiet reply.

And I not only thought so then; I still think so to this good day.

This article uses material from the Wikipedia article
 Metasyntactic variable, which is released under the 
Creative Commons
Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.