Pirates' Hope

At this question Van Dyck looked a trifle foolish.

"I thought we tied those fellows securely enough last night," he offered. "Didn't you?"

"I did, indeed. Are you trying to tell me that they've picked the locks?"

"They are not where we left them; that is one sure thing. I went out there early this morning, meaning to make them talk and tell me what's what on the Andromeda. They had disappeared."

"They are loose on the island?" I gasped.

"That would be the natural inference, you'd say. But I couldn't find any trace of them – haven't yet found any."

"Then the Andromeda must have come back to take them off."

Van Dyck's eyes narrowed.

"I wouldn't go so far as to say that it is impossible. But the seas are still running pretty high, and if the yacht's people were able to make a landing with either of the power launches before dawn, they are better sailormen than I've been giving them credit for being."

"They'd come back for their men if it were humanly possible," I ventured, "and they might have good hopes of being able to find them alive. The wreck of the yawl happened after the yacht had disappeared, you remember. But if they did come back, how about the treasure trove? Would they go away again without digging up your plantation? But perhaps they did dig it up?"

He shook his head.

"No; that is the first thing I thought of when the five men turned up missing. The block of coral is just where we left it. Nothing has been disturbed."

"But if that is what the landing party came for last night – "

"I know; it's a mystery, but in the heart of it lies our best hope, I believe. They meant to dig when they made that landing last night. I found a shovel this morning. In their hurry to get away, the yawl crew left it on the beach and the seas had washed it up under the trees."

"Whereabouts is the hope?" I inquired.

"It is all guess-work," he admitted. "Assuming that they came last night to dig – and didn't dig – and assuming again that they came back in the dark hour before dawn, and still didn't dig, it is a fair inference that we haven't seen the last of the Andromeda– or isn't it?"

"I don't know," I said. "The plot has grown much too complicated for me. Meanwhile, I suppose we ought to be thankful that we haven't five additional mouths to fill – with nothing to fill them with. You wouldn't have let those five pirates starve, would you, Bonteck?"

The look that came into his eyes was handsomely gloomy.

"I meant to come just as near doing it as I could, and get by without serving a sentence for manslaughter." And with that, he pulled his cap over his eyes and walked away, coming back presently with a still gloomier look in his eyes.

"It's hell, Dick," he broke out grittingly. "I've got to tell these people of ours what's been done to them. It is the least I can do now. There is starvation just ahead of us; and from what we saw last night, it is perfectly plain that if the Andromeda comes back, it won't be for the purpose of taking us off."

"Not to take us off, perhaps, but the other motive – the motive that brought her here last night – still exists. If she came to dig up your buried 'ammunition' which has so mysteriously disappeared, she will come again. You may depend upon that."

"Just the same, I've got to tell them," he said doggedly, going back to the conscientious part of it; adding: "And I'd much rather be shot. It was such an asinine thing, even as I had it shaped up in the beginning. How can I ever make it appear to them as it appeared to me? – as a harmless little practical joke, with no particular sting in its tail? In the light of what has happened, I can never hope to make it look that way; not even to you or to Madeleine, I'm afraid."

I rose upon an elbow.

"Why not wait a little longer?" I argued. "The Andromeda will surely turn up again, and when she does, it will be up to us to recapture her at all hazards. When that is done, you can tell the others, if you still think it necessary."

"But I owe it to you, at least, to tell them now."

"Why to me, especially?"

"For Conetta's sake."

"I'll answer for Conetta."

He sat down on the biscuit box, where he had been sitting when I came awake, and put his back against a tree.

"I'm a wholesale murderer, Dick; that is about what it comes to!" he groaned. "I have brought the woman I'd die for down into this devil's sea to starve her to death. I know you'll say that I meant it all the other way about, and so I did. But in this world it is only results that count. I'm a bloody assassin."

I tried sitting up in the hammock, and found that it could be done. Then I tried standing, and found that this, too, was possible.

"Supposing we go and join the breakfast chase," I suggested, meaning to interpose a saving distraction; and we did it.

This was the beginning of the fourth act – the most disheartening fourth act – in our gladsome little Caribbean comedy which was turning out so tragically. For a day or two we were able to make light of the sudden change of diet, and even of its scantiness, and to extract some sort of forced fun out of the oyster dredging and the crabbing; also, out of our not too successful attempts to vary the menu by fishing, with bent hat-pins for hooks, in the crystal-clear waters of the lagoon. But in a short while the laugh came less readily, and the eyes of some – of the younger women, at least – grew strained from much staring at dazzling, but empty, horizons, and filled easily with tears.

Yet, on the whole, the revelation of inner egos brought about by this face-to-face fronting of a desperate extremity was not disappointing. Stripped now of all the maskings of make-believe, we saw one another as we were, and much that had been hidden was found to be heart-mellowing and even inspiring when it was dragged out into the unsparing light of a common disaster.

The courage of the women, in particular, was the finest thing imaginable. There were nine of them starving heroically with us, and they were doing it with a measure of cheer that was beyond all praise. Even Miss Mehitable refused to figure as an exception. "We must be good losers," she said to Conetta and me one evening when we were trying to tempt her with a bit of broiled fish without seasoning. And she did not resent it when Alicia Van Tromp, thrusting a laughing face in at the open tent flap, called her "a dear, dead-game old sport."

For the men there is less to be said; partly because it is a man's job to endure hardness anyway, and partly because three of our nine were not living up to their privileges. Ingerson was doing a little better, to be sure; for one thing, he was no longer thrusting himself upon Madeleine. During the night of the hurricane he had lain out in all the fury of it, and possibly the pouring deluge had washed some of the brute out of him. At all events, he was less obnoxious, holding himself aloof in a half-surly way, and seeming – or so we hoped – to be fighting a morose battle with his appetite. Once, when I spoke of his changed attitude to Conetta, she quoted Scripture at me: "'This kind goeth not out but by fasting and prayer.' I doubt if he is praying much, but he is certainly fasting."

Major Terwilliger, on the other hand, grew even more contemptible as the pinch nipped the harder. Ranging the island for edible things, as we all did, he discovered a wild mango in bearing, and though the fruit would have been a grateful boon to all as a change, he kept the discovery to himself for two whole days before Billy Grisdale, who was trailing him, made him give up and share what was left on the tree. Holly Barclay had given up his pretense of illness and was less exacting than before; but he was still utterly useless in any practical way.

During this interval, in which we were maintaining night and day watches and patrolling the beaches, Bonteck was still holding his peace as I had counseled him to, though I could see that his load was growing heavier day by day. As to the events of the hurricane night, it was by agreement that no mention of the Andromeda's visit had been made to the others. This was Bonteck's idea. Since nothing had come of the yacht's return and our adventure with the five men who had so mysteriously disappeared, he argued that no good could result from spreading the news; that the news couldn't well be spread without adding explanations which I, myself, had advised him to withhold.

It was a week, or perhaps a day or so more than that, after the night of alarms that Van Dyck took me aside and showed me a piece of light rope such as is used for signal halliards on board ship; a piece, I said, but I should have said two short pieces tied together in a hard knot.

"Do you recognize it?" he asked.

I shook my head.

"Of course, I couldn't swear to it," he said, "but it looks like a bit of the flag halliards from the yacht. In other words, a bit of the rope with which we tied the five pirates."

"Well?" I queried.

"I forgot to say that when I went to look for those fellows the next morning, I didn't find any of these rope lashings. They didn't leave even that much of a trace of themselves when they made off."

"Well?" I said again.

"I suppose you are pretty well convinced by this time that the Andromeda came back and took them off, and so am I. Taking that view of it, you'll know what it means when I tell you that I found this piece of knotted rope in the bushes a few yards from our camp – lost out of somebody's pocket, for a guess."

Truly, I did know. It meant that the Andromeda had come a second time, and that, in addition to rescuing the survivors of the yawl's crew, the rescuing party had crept up upon us; had been near enough to massacre the lot of us as we slept after the strenuous exertions of the forepart of the night.

"Um," said I; "why didn't they kill us all off while the killing was good? Perhaps you can answer me that."

"There may have been reasons. Possibly the landing party – the second one – wasn't big enough to attempt it with safety. Besides, what was the use of their troubling themselves when the lapse of a little time would take the job off their hands?"

Here was a ready explanation for all that had happened, or hadn't happened, since the night of the storm. The mutineers were merely giving us time to starve to death. Their spying expedition had doubtless shown them that our stores were gone, and they could easily argue that in a few days we, too, would be gone – at least gone past the point at which we could interfere with anything they wished to do on the island.