Pirates' Hope

It was on a crabbing expedition when, as it chanced, I was paired with the youngest of the Van Tromp trio, that Edith asked a question which I knew must be trembling continually upon the lips of every woman in our forlorn company.

"How long can it last, Uncle Dick? How long can we live on just cocoanuts and hope, after the horrid great oysters are all gone, and these creepy, leggy crabs have grown too cunning to let us catch them?"

"We must try not to dwell upon that," I told her. "Our problem is to live from day to day."

"But there will come a day," she asserted. "I can see it in Billy's eyes, when I can get him to look at me."

"Ouch!" I said, purposely letting a crab nip my finger for the sake of making a diversion. But the tribe to which Miss Edith belongs rejoices in its ability to cling, limpet-like, to a matter in hand.

"The Caribs were cannibals, weren't they? – in the long ago?" she went on. "Are we coming to that, Richard Preble? If we should, Billy and I will draw straws. We're both young and tender, you know."

"Hush!" I commanded; "that isn't a pretty joke." And later that same day, when I was able to get hold of Billy Grisdale, I read the riot act to him.

"You want to rub the O-Lord-pity-us look out of your eyes, young man, and put a little more ginger into your conversation with Edie," I suggested. "She is beginning to see things in the back part of your brain, and that isn't good for little girl Crusoes."

"Take it to yourself!" he retorted spitefully. "I saw you looking at Conetta not fifteen minutes ago with a scare in your eyes big enough to set an innocent bystander's teeth on edge."

"I'll reform," I promised, "and so must you, Billy. Take Bonteck for your model; not me."

"Bonteck's got something up his sleeve," he said morosely. "He's been going through the bunch for weapons. Think of it – nine men of us here three thousand miles out of reach of a policeman, and not so much as one poor little potato-popgun among us."

This was a mistake on Billy's part, of course. We still had the three pistols taken from the men we had waylaid on the night of the storm, but of these no mention had been made to Billy or any of the others, since to speak of them would have called for the story of the night's adventures – a story which Van Dyck and I were still keeping to ourselves.

But Billy's remark about the inquiry for weapons was news of a sort. Had Van Dyck caught a fresh glimpse of the Andromeda's smoke plume on the horizon he was always sweeping with the field-glass?

"Bonteck wasn't trying to disarm anybody, was he?" I asked.

"Oh, no. He talked sort of vaguely about a scrap of some kind, and being prepared for it; wanted to know if the professor and Grey and Dupuyster and I would put ourselves under orders, and do what he might tell us to, sight unseen. Said maybe he'd be able to explain more fully a little later on."

I thought I saw what was in Van Dyck's mind. His secret was gnawing the life out of him, and, sooner or later, it would have to come out. I knew well enough that he was not hesitating from any cowardly motive; it was rather because I had urged him to wait, holding out the hope that a more auspicious time for the telling of the plot would come – or at least that a less auspicious time than this starvation period could hardly come.

In the waiting interval, and as in some sense still our host and leader, he had been obliged to busy himself with something, and apart from the daily effort to make the hardships less grinding upon all of us, and the women in particular, he had organized the six of us men who were willing into four-hour watches of two men each to patrol the two beaches, urging our daily decreasing food supply as a reason for the increased vigilance, and insisting that we must not allow the smallest chance of discovery to escape us. If a ship were sighted in the night, the two watchers making the discovery were to arouse the other four instantly, and without giving a general alarm.

Though he had not confided it to me in detail, his plan was obvious enough. He was still expecting another return of the Andromeda, and was determined to make a desperate effort to regain possession of the yacht when the chance should offer. For this attempt, hazardous as it would surely prove to be, he could count definitely upon only six of our nine. Barclay was certainly out of it, and the major's age exempted him. Ingerson was a doubtful quantity – very doubtful from my point of view – and I questioned if Van Dyck would call upon him or make him a party to any plan that might be determined upon when the time for action should arrive. Still, outnumbered as we must be, a recapture of the yacht appeared to be our only hope. We might all starve a thousand times over before any chance ship should sight our isolated island; sight it and approach near enough to make out our distress signals.

Just how much or how little Van Dyck would confess to the others, if a time should come when he would no longer be able to keep silence, was a question that was puzzling me. To tell the assembled castaways that there had probably been a real mutiny where only a sham one was intended would cut no figure as news, since sixteen of our eighteen already believed it to have been real. That being the case, the only encouraging thing to be revealed was the burial of the golden hoard, and the reasonable hope it gave us that the Andromeda would come back, sooner or later, in order to search for it.

As to this, however, I was quite confident that Bonteck would never go so far as to tell the others about the gold planting. That he would publish the bald truth about his generous and lover-like little plot, the object of which was to enable Madeleine Barclay to buy her freedom of choice in matters matrimonial, was simply unthinkable. And if the gold-burying episode were to be left out of his confession, in what other manner could he account to the others for his belief that the yacht would eventually return?

As it came about, the answers to all these questioning reflections were already marshaling themselves for a descent upon us at the moment when I was undertaking to show Billy Grisdale that a man's eyes should be kept decently shuttered when his brain is conjuring up pictures of the terrible things that may happen to the loved one.

On this same evening Professor Sanford and I were paired to take the first watch for the patrolling of the beach, and at eight o'clock we set out from the camp in the glade, leaving the other members of our Crusoe company sitting around the dying embers of the cooking fire. Following the regular sentry-go routine, Sanford and I parted at the camp; he was to take the south beach and I the north, and we were to meet at the sandspit in which the island terminated to the eastward. As I tramped along upon my solitary watch round I was sorrier than ever for Van Dyck. All that day he had been going about like a man with a dozen murders on his conscience, and it was plain to be seen that each added day – days in which he was obliged to see some of us actually going hungry because we hadn't been able to gather enough to satisfy eighteen normal and healthy appetites – was crowding him nearer to the brink of the humiliating confession chasm. From advising him not to tell, I was coming around to the opposite point of view and wishing that I hadn't tried to stop him. As matters stood, he was like a man facing a deferred surgical operation. It was true, the operation might prove fatal; but there were opportunities for the dying of any number of anticipatory deaths during the interval of suspense.

Skirting the northern edge of the island without seeing anything to mar the mirror-like surface of the starlit sea, I was first at the sandspit rendezvous by a good half-hour. Since there was no reason for haste, and the sandy cape commanded a wide view of the watery waste in all directions save one, I filled my pipe with the final shakings of my last sack of tobacco, and after poking in the ashes of the neglected signal fire and finding no live coals among them, I lighted the pipe with one of the few precious matches we were hoarding, and sat down on the sands to wait. In due course of time the professor appeared, a dark figure trudging along aimlessly; and when he came nearer I saw that he had his hands clasped behind him and was walking with his head down like a person buried in the deepest thought – the very antitype of an alert coast guardsman on the watch for a sail. When he descried me he came over and sat down beside me, still thoughtfully abstracted.

"I was beginning to wonder what had become of you, Professor," I said, merely to start things going.

"Yes; I was detained. Mr. Van Dyck called me back shortly after you left," he explained half-absently. Then he opened up: "Mr. Preble, I have been listening to a most astounding – er – confession, I suppose you might call it. I wonder if you know what it is?"

"I do," I answered shortly. "Van Dyck has been telling you that a harmless little comedy planned by him to break the monotony of our cruise has turned into a potential tragedy, with all the attendant hardships and horrors."

"You are quite right. He was very manly about it, and he blames himself unsparingly. It was an exceedingly difficult thing for him to do – to tell us of it. He realized fully that the present conditions must make any explanation seem wretchedly inadequate."

"They do," I agreed, and then I asked the one burning question: "The others, Professor Sanford? How did they take it?"

"A-a-hem-hem – h'm; each after his or her kind, Mr. Preble. The women are pretty generally sympathetic. They see only the immense responsibility which Mr. Van Dyck freely acknowledges, and are very humanly and generously sorry for him. I wish I might say as much for the men. Grey and young Grisdale are both loyal, though it was plainly evident that Grey had to fight for his loyalty, since the unhappy outcome involves his wife. Ingerson talked and acted like a surly ruffian, as you would imagine; and Major Terwilliger's language was scarcely less reprehensible. Dupuyster played the man. He rebuked his uncle quite sharply and went across to grip Van Dyck's hand and to say what a manly fellow might say in the circumstances. And Miss Van Tromp – the second Miss Van Tromp – went with him."

"Of course," I said crustily – and made another mark on the score that I meant to settle with one Gerald Dupuyster if we should ever attain to a time when personal scores could be audited and settled. Then I reminded the professor that he had omitted Mr. Holly Barclay.

"I wish to continue omitting him," was the reply, and the professor's tone was a measure of his disgust. "Let it be sufficient to say that he made his daughter blush for very shame with his puerile accusations. He even went so far as to intimate that Mr. Van Dyck was not telling the truth; that the entire affair was a deep-laid plot designed to involve Miss Madeleine in some way."

"That was to be expected – from Holly Barclay," I said. "But you are omitting one more: Professor Abner Sanford, Ph. D."

I was relighting my pipe with another of the precious matches, and in the momentary flare the professor's plain-song face revealed itself. There was a half-quizzical smile wrinkling at the corners of the quiet gray eyes.

"Mrs. Sanford and I are Mr. Van Dyck's guests," he qualified. "But, apart from that, I was content to wait and hear what might develop further. As it appears, Mr. Van Dyck has not entirely lost hope. If there were a real mutiny – and, indeed, there seems little doubt of that – Van Dyck still has confidence in the resourcefulness of Goff, the sailing-master. He insists that, sooner or later, the Andromeda will return."

In the little interval of silence that followed I was turning the professor's story over thoughtfully in my mind. There had evidently been no mention made of the gold-burying episode. Van Dyck had dodged it very cleverly, it seemed, letting it be understood that his hope of the yacht's return was based upon the loyalty, in the last resort, of Elijah Goff. It was better that way. So long as the hope had been definitely held out to the others, there was no need of terrifying the women by telling them that if we should be lucky enough to regain our ship it would be by hard knocks and a rather forlorn-hope fight against overwhelming odds as to numbers and arms.

"There is still one vote outstanding, Mr. Preble – your own," said the professor, breaking into my reverie.

"You have already taken that for granted," I returned. "If Bonteck had confided in me before the fact – which I assure you he did not – I should certainly have vetoed his plan for a fortnight's picnic on this God-forsaken bit of coral in the middle of nowhere. Yet, as his nearest friend, I can understand, perhaps better than any one else, why he was impelled to do it. Also, I can understand that he had no reason whatever to foresee the remotest possibility of any such tragic turn as things have taken."

"Of course, of course; I think we shall all understand that after we have duly weighed and considered." The professor had locked his fingers over his knees and was regarding me thoughtfully. "Do you know," he went on, quite as if the main problems had been worked out and definitely wiped from the blackboard, "do you know, I am sometimes a little regretful that I didn't learn to smoke tobacco in my younger days? You gentlemen of the pipe and cigar seem to get so much comfort out of it."

"It is never too late to mend – or mar," I told him; and with that we got up to resume our respective sentry beats by which, under the established routine, each of us would return to the camp end of the island by the route over which the other had come.

When we parted it was with the agreement to meet again at the western extremity of the island, and I ventured to call my watchmate's attention to the fact that a lookout's duty was to look out.

"Why, bless me! – of course it is," he laughed. "Now that you mention it, I remember that I wasn't very faithful on the way over here. I'll reform, Mr. Preble, I will, truly." And he went on his way around the north beach toward the bay of the galleon wreck.

It is probably a rare thing for a crisis in the affairs of a group of nearly a score of people to turn upon so trivial a matter as the tobacco habit. There was still an unburned dottel in my pipe, and I could not think of wasting it. If I had not stopped and felt in my pockets for my one remaining match while the professor was still a trudging shadow on the white sands of the northern beach, the crisis might have come and gone undiscovered by any soul of our eighteen.

For, just as I had found the match and was in the act of striking it, the ghost-like bulk of a ship loomed silently in the starlight a short half-mile to the eastward; a ship headed directly for the island and showing no lights. It was the Andromeda again.