Pirates' Hope

"Oh, Richard Preble – find her – find her!" she gasped. "She's gone and she'll be drowned – I know she'll be drowned!"

A hurried question or two elicited the alarming facts. Billy Grisdale and Edith Van Tromp had not come in from their post at the western signal point, and Conetta had flown to warn them. That was enough for me. With a blunt word to Van Dyck, I deserted.

It was only a short quarter of a mile to the western extremity of the island, and I covered it in a stumbling rush, with the wind knocking me down and forcing me to scramble on hands and knees when it got a fair sweep at me. Reaching the point where we had built our fire and flown our distress signal from the lopped palm, nothing was recognizable in the darkness, but as nearly as I could make out, the tree was gone and the breakers were running man-head deep over the place where the fire had been. I had a bad minute or two until I had shouted and groped around and found the three missing ones crouching in the shelter of the nearest jungle growth. It had been horribly easy to fancy them blown into the sea from the bare sandspit.

Billy was doing his best, as any one who knew him would have predicted. He had wattled the bushes together behind the two women, and had stripped off his coat to add it to the shelter. Nevertheless, he made no secret of his relief when he heard my shout at his ear.

"By Jove," he choked; "misery likes company, you know. Cuddle down here, Uncle Dick, and tell us we're only dreaming when we think we're soaked to the skin. A little more and I believe it would really make up its mind to rain! What's the show for getting back to camp? I couldn't do it with two of 'em – tried it and we all came near being washed away."

"No show at all at present; we'll have to wait a bit," I said; and then I took my part in the sheltering. In the dash from the dismantled camp I had caught up a square of canvas that had served as part of a tent fly, and with Grisdale's help, it was rigged as a sort of rain break to windward.

"I knew you'd come," said Conetta quite calmly, when there was nothing more to do or to be done, and the four of us were cowering under the canvas. And then, with the calmness somewhat shaken: "The others? Are they all alive?"

"Alive and unhurt, so far as I could tell in the dark," I hastened to say. "They are moving the camp back into the wood. Ingerson was the only one who was missing."

"What has become of him?"

I didn't tell her that Van Dyck and I had left him asleep under the trees on the north shore of the island some two hours earlier. It didn't seem at all necessary to harrow her with the story of Ingerson's miring in the drink demoniac's morass.

"I don't know just what has become of him," I said, which was strictly true as to the bare fact. "He'll doubtless turn up all right in the morning."

"You say they are moving the camp. Will it be safer in the wood?"

"There was no choice. The seas are breaking over the other place by now."

"Poor Aunt Mehitable!" she said brokenly. "At the very first lull we must go back to her, Dick."

"There is no special hurry," I offered. "She is all right, and she sent me out to find you; begged me to go."

"She sent you?"

"Yes; me, and not Jerry Dupuyster."

There was silence for a little time; such silence as the shrieks of the hurricane and the crashing of the seas permitted. Then she said drearily: "We can't go back and begin all over again, you and I, Richard. It's too late, now."

Most naturally, I could take this declaration only in one sense. She had admitted that Jerry had asked her to marry him, and her saying that it was too late was merely an indirect way of telling me that she was promised to him. And that thought set me boiling inwardly again. For in the hubbub of camp moving Jerry had been doing his impractical best to shelter Beatrice Van Tromp; this when he must have known that Conetta was somewhere out in the storm.

"I shall have a good-sized bone to pick with Jerry, if we ever get back to normal again," I said, and because I didn't take the trouble to try to whisper the threat, Edie Van Tromp cut in.

"Stop it, you two!" she commanded. "I can't hear what you're saying, but I know you are quarreling."

Billy Grisdale groaned. "If I only had my mandolin!" he lamented. "Get down, Tige" – this to the bull pup who was trying to climb into his master's lap for better protection from the storm. And then to me: "How long do these little summer sprinkles last, Uncle Dick?"

I declined to commit myself, It didn't strike me as a Christian thing to do to make the women more miserable by telling them that the storm might last for days, and that our best hope was for a cessation of the pouring rain floods.

As it turned out, in this one respect we were favored. After about an hour the rain was coming only in driving squalls and the thick darkness was a little broken. Overhead the moon showed faintly through the masses of cloud wrack hurling themselves westward on the high crest of the gale, and there was a pallid promise of a clearing sky.

But with the ceasing of the downpour the wind increased to hurricane fury, and the pounding of the seas upon the reef and upon the island itself was like a succession of earthquake shocks. As far as our limited range of vision could reach, the sea was heaving and tossing in mountain-like billows with valleys between in which the tallest ship would have been hidden, and it was plainly evident that a new danger was threatening. Our island was low and flat; in its highest spots it was scarcely more than eight or ten feet above the normal sea level. If the gale should blow long enough and hard enough, it could be only a question of time until the catapulting seas would break down the jungle barriers and sweep the island from end to end.

"Time for us to move!" Grisdale sang out, as a particularly vicious "seventh wave" broke just behind us and reached for our shelter spot in its tumultuous torrenting across the sands; and we took the hint.

"You two fight for yourselves," I called back, and the battle with the pouring gale was begun.

It was a battle royal. For every foot of the quarter mile we had to fight desperately. Even in the wood it was impossible at times to stand against the wind, and again and again we had to fling ourselves prone, clinging to whatever hold offered itself. And at every step the palm fronds above our heads were crackling and snapping like whips, and the air was full of flying missiles.

We held together for the better part of the time, Grisdale and Edie locking arms and facing the blasts in the fresh strength of youth and health, and taking their buffetings with a laugh. So battling and creeping by turns, we came at last to the breathless home stretch, and I was unspeakably relieved to find the white tents still standing intact in the glade which Van Dyck had chosen for their latest pitching place.

"Keep your good nerve just a few minutes longer," I said to Conetta, who was clinging to me with a grip that I think no hurricane blast could have broken. "We are almost there."

I had a glimpse in the starlight of her face upturned to mine, and saw her lips move as if in reply. But what she was saying I did not hear. For at that moment one of the flying missiles – it was a broken tree-top, they told me afterward – came between and blotted me out.

XIV

HAND TO MOUTH

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

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

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

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

I took stock of myself and answered accordingly.

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

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

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

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

"Otherwise?" I queried.

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

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

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

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

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

"No edible roots?"

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