Pirates' Hope

"Did you ever, for one little fraction of a minute, doubt it, Mr. Richard Preble?"

"No; it is only fair to say that I have never doubted it. You and Billy are the real thing, whatever may be said for the remainder of us."

"Billy is a darling!" she declared enthusiastically. "Last night, when those pirates rushed us with their guns, you know, I wanted to cry; boo-hoo right out like a silly baby. It was just plain scare. A grown man would have tried to comfort me, I suppose, but Billy joshed me and made fun of me until I was too mad to be scared. Isn't it a thousand pities that he's so young, and so – so – "

"So poor?" I finished for her. "It is; a thousand pities. But there is hope on ahead, my dear child. Billy will outgrow his infancy some time; and you mustn't lose sight of the fact that, so far as poverty and riches are concerned, we all look very much alike, just now."

In such light-hearted banterings back and forth we put the quarter-mile of beach behind us and got busy with our smudge-fire building at the foot of the stripped palm-tree which carried one of Madeleine Barclay's knitted shoulder wraps for a distress signal. With a few palmetto leaves and bits of rotting wood to crisp and smoulder in the blaze we soon had our smoke column erected; and beyond this there was nothing much to do save to scan the horizon for the hoped-for sail.

"Do you really believe we shall be taken off before long, Dick Preble?" was Miss Edith's soberly put query, this after the fire was well established, and we were doing the horizon-sweeping stunt.

"Do you want the bald truth, or some nice little hopeful fiction?" I asked.

"You may save the fictions for Conetta and Madeleine and Annette, if you please. As you were kind enough to admit, a few minutes ago, I am a woman grown."

"Then I shall tell you plainly, Edie. I know this island. It is quite some distance from the nearest of the steamer lanes. It may be a long time before any one finds us."

She was silent for a little while, but the resolute, girlish eyes were quite unterrified. When she spoke again it was of a different matter.

"Dick," she began earnestly, "do you believe there is anything more than foolishness at the bottom of all the talk we bear about a woman's intuition?"

"All sober-minded people admit that there is, don't they?" I said.

"There is something behind all this that is happening to us," she asserted gravely; "something that I can feel, and can't grasp or understand. It is as real to me as the breeze in those palms, or this staring sunshine, and is as intangible as both."

"You have been talking with Conetta," I said shortly.

"About this? No, I haven't. What makes you say that?"

"No matter; go on with your intangibility."

"This sudden mutiny and the way it was hurled at us: it is all so strange and unaccountable. Who ever heard of the sailing-master of a private yacht turning pirate? And especially a dear, cross old Uncle Elijah, whose ancestors probably came over in the Mayflower?"

"Is Bonteck saying that Goff headed the mutiny?" I asked.

"He is letting the others say it, which is just the same."

"As you say, it is fairly incredible. Yet the fact remains. We are here, and the Andromeda, with Goff on board, has vanished."

"I know; but the mystery isn't to be solved in any such easy way as that. What possible use can Uncle Elijah or his crew of Portuguese and mixed-bloods make of the Andromeda, which is probably known in every civilized harbor of the world as Mr. Bonteck Van Dyck's private yacht?"

I hesitated to tell her the story of the treasure-carrying. That was Van Dyck's secret, so long as he chose to make a secret of it.

"As to the object of the mutiny, we are all entitled to a guess," I said. Then I offered one which was plausible or not, as one chose to view it: "Suppose we suppose that some one of the Central or South American countries is on the edge of a revolution; that isn't very hard to imagine, is it?"

"No."

"Very well. The sharpest need of the rebels in any revolution is for arms and ammunition; next to this, a fast ship to carry the arms and ammunition. If there should happen to be money enough in the revolutionary war-chest, isn't it conceivable that even an Uncle Elijah might be tempted?"

She turned and looked me squarely in the eye.

"Is that your guess, Dick Preble?" she demanded.

"It is as good as any, isn't it?" I replied evasively.

When she said: "It doesn't satisfy me; it is too absurd," her repetition of Conetta's protest of the previous night was almost startling.

"There are times when you women are almost uncanny," I told her, but she merely laughed at that.

"The absurdity isn't my only hunch," she went on, after the frank-speaking manner of her kind. "This Robinson Crusoe experience is going to be a dreadful thing, in a way. There won't be any illusions left for any of us, I'm afraid – any more than there were for the people of the Stone Age."

That sage remark brought on more talk, and we speculated cheerfully on the death of the illusions and what might reasonably be expected as the results thereof. My chatty companion had a lively imagination, and her forecastings of the changes that would ensue in the different members of our colony were handsomely entertaining.

"And you," she said, when she had worked her way around to me in the prophesying; "I can just see what an unlivable person you will become."

"Why should I be so particularly unlivable?" I asked.

"That awful temper of yours," she went on baldly. "With all the civilized veneer cracked and peeling off – my-oh!"

Now it is one thing to be well assured, in one's own summings-up, of the possession of a violent temper, and quite another to be told bluntly that the possession is a commonly accepted fact among one's friends and acquaintances. Edie Van Tromp's assertion of the fact as one that had – or might have been – published in the newspapers came with a decided shock.

"Am I as bad as all that?" I protested.

"Everybody knows what a vile temper you have," she replied coolly. "Anybody who couldn't get along with Conetta Kincaide without quarreling with her – "

"Oh; so she has told you I have quarreled with her?"

"There you go," she gibed. "One has only to mention Conetta to you to touch off the powder train. What makes you quarrel with her, Uncle Dick?"

"What makes you think I am quarreling with her?"

"Hoo! I've got eyes, I guess. Of course, you've been decently polite to her, but a blind person could see that it was just put on. The veneer wasn't cracked then. I shudder to think what will happen when it gets all cracked and peelly."

I thought it was time for a diversion, so I turned the tables upon her.

"How will it be with you after the veneer glue lets go?"

"Oh, me? – I'm just a crude little brute, anyway. I don't just see how I could change for the worse. I'm saying this because I know it is what you are thinking. But there's one comfort. Billy won't see any difference in me, no matter what I do. And Billy himself won't change; he's too obvious."

We prolonged our watch until nearly noon, when the professor and his wife came out to relieve us. It may say itself that during our two hours or more of horizon-searching we saw no signs of a rescue vessel. In the wide three-quarters of a circle visible from the western point of the island – a point where I had spent many weary hours after the shipwreck of the Mary Jane– there had been only the calm expanse of sea and sky with nothing to break the monotony.

At the camp under the palms we found things settling into some sort of routine. A fire was going in the rude fire place built of rough chunks of the coral, and Mrs. Van Tromp and her athletic eldest were cooking dinner. The major and Holly Barclay were still loafing on the beach, both of them smoking as though we had a Tampa cigar factory to draw upon instead of a strictly limited supply of Van Dyck's "perfectos." Madeleine and Beatrice Van Tromp, working together, were trying to fashion a basket out of stripped palm fronds – though just what purpose a basket would serve I couldn't imagine.

Billy Grisdale, suddenly become useful, was gathering bits of wood for the cooking fire. Jack Grey, who, besides being a rising young attorney, had a flair for building things, was adding to the thatch of the dunnage shelter, and Annette was helping him. Ingerson was invisible, and so was Van Dyck. Miss Mehitable, whose health may or may not have been all that it should be, was lying in her hammock, and Conetta, ever dutiful, was fanning her with a broad palmetto leaf. Among the workers it was Jerry Dupuyster who appeared in the most original rôle. In the nattiest of one-piece bathing suits – supplied, as I made no doubt, out of the luggage of one of the Van Tromp girls – he had swum the lagoon to the wreck of the Mary Jane, where he now appeared, a symphony in cerise stripes and bare legs, hacking manfully at the wreck with a hand-axe to the end that we might increase our scanty stock of firewood.

After the noon meal, at which Van Dyck appeared just as we were sitting down to it, Jerry and I were told off to go on sentry duty at the eastern end of the island, where we were to establish another distress signal.

"Us for the sentry-go, old chappie," said Jerry cheerfully, and together we took the beach trail for our post.