The Pursuit Part 43

Rescue, liberty, and, not least, triumph over Landon! These were all possibilities, even probabilities, clear to Claire Van Arlen's intelligence as she bent over Aylmer--clear, but undefined. Yet the one outstanding, engrossing thought was that her champion had fallen in the moment of victory. The blood was flowing from a deep cut on his forehead; he was unconscious; the color had ebbed from his very lips. An agony of apprehension seized upon her. He was dead! He was dead!

And then--the pulse of that relief will be quick in her to her dying day--his eyes opened, he stirred. He did more than stir; he made efforts to rise.

She held him masterfully; her voice was stern in her command to him to lie still. And he looked up at her with an incredulous glance in which humor had its part. He smiled--a puzzled smile. Suddenly remembrance came back to him and his bewilderment became anxiety.

"The gunboat?" he asked hoa.r.s.ely. "They saw me, they were slowing down!"

She nodded silently as she looked about her. They had floated within the shadow cast by the towering bulk of the island nearest them. The last red rim of the sun's disc had pa.s.sed below the horizon. The dusk was gathering. A mile away the gunboat was turning ponderously.

Rapidly she told him what she saw and he nodded a satisfied a.s.sent.

"They're done, now," he whispered triumphantly. "We have them in a cleft stick!"

But Fate--listening Fate--shook her head.

It was Muhammed who had taken command of the situation, Muhammed who roared his orders to hoist again the half-lowered sail, to let drift the dingy from the stern, to stand by the halliards for a tack. He leaped upon the tiller and flung the boat's prow round to point directly for the land.

The freshening breeze from the northwest swelled out the great sail as the panting sailors swung the yard aslant the mast. The water sang and bubbled from the prow. The _Santa Margarita_ leaped landwards like a living thing, straight for the cliffs of shadowing stone.

Captain Luigi, completely unnerved by the sudden crisis to which events had soared, wailed protests without attempting interference.

"I call you to witness that I said he had the evil eye!" he cried. "I call you to witness! Capture or destruction--there are no two ways to it!"

"There is One G.o.d and one road to safety for a brave man," answered Muhammed, as he leaned his strength upon the helm. "They call it courage. Run out the French flag, _amigo_! They dare not fire on that, here, in debatable waters, for all their claim to these islands as within the grip of Spain."

A sudden pang of doubt shook Claire. The gunboat was completing its turning movement--slowly--ah, how slowly! And yet? How could the felucca, with no more than a fresh breeze to rely on, hope to evade that greyhound of the seas? A spout of gray smoke burst from the gray painted sides; the sound of a cannon shot echoed down to them among the crags.

Muhammed laughed.

"Blank cartridge," he said derisively. "Within five minutes their faces will be as blank. Sons of dirt, I spit upon you!"

The girl's apprehension grew. Confidence rang in the Moor's voice. He smiled as one who had already triumphed. And still the felucca drove sh.o.r.ewards, relentlessly towards the bare face of stone.

But the torpedo boat was gaining speed. The white lift of the foam was veiling her bows; she ripped through the waters as a blade rips through calico, directly, cleanly, tossing aside the waves. Another few minutes--seven--six--perhaps less--and she must be alongside. And the island cliff seemed to overhang them now; the great sail flapped as the breeze beat back from the sheer rock against its breadth.

A second time Muhammed roared his orders. The sailors shifted the huge spar around the mast, swinging it as on a pivot. The _Santa Margarita_ came about, dancingly.

The rush and boil of breaking foam on the seaward bow caught Claire's ear. She glanced over the taffrail.

A comber was breaking on a great tooth of black rock within half a cable's length of the boat. Not far ahead she saw the white after-spume of another--and beyond that a third--a fourth--countless ones. They were within a very labyrinth of reefs. And Muhammed, swerving the tiller delicately from side to side, steered unshaken, his eyes piercing into the swiftly coming gloom, the smile of victory growing round his lips.

She understood, and before she turned her eyes astern knew hope was lost. The torpedo boat was slackening speed; the cream of her wake began to slide past her sides and swirl round her bow as she slowed, went astern, halted on the lips of danger, and then reluctantly turned.

A yell went up from the felucca as the crew saw themselves saved--a yell of defiance.

Again the gray jet of smoke spurted from the gray port, and this time the background of purple dusk showed the red tongue of the flame. The sound of the report reached them, but not so swiftly as another sound--a nerve-rending menace which shrieked in their very ears, as it seemed, and pa.s.sed, to thunder crashingly against the forehead of the crag. And again Muhammed laughed and showed his white teeth, and roared to his fellows to swing the yard-arm about as he spun the boat between two waiting jaws of rock and sent her bounding out into the open before the lash of the favoring breeze. And night fell over them--for Claire Van Arlen the hopeless night of despair.

She looked up to find Miller standing beside her, looking down at Aylmer's face with sombre, inquiring eyes. And she realized for the first time that in that face the eyes were closed again, the lips bloodless, the cheeks sunken. She gave an exclamation; she bent and stanched the blood which still flowed from the wounded temple.

Miller picked up a bucket, seized a rope, attached it to the handle, and slung it overboard. He placed it, brimmed with water, at her feet. She looked up again, eyed him silently and without thanks, dipped her handkerchief in the water and laved Aylmer's face. And Miller himself remained silent, as if he would force the first comment from her, as if he probed for information by mere inertness. Had he been heard? She guessed that he was asking himself--and by force of silence, her--this question.

A sudden instinct not to betray herself gripped her. Aylmer? Was not he an example of a like reticence? He had not revealed the fact that his hands were free till circ.u.mstances had revealed it, with a vengeance.

She would follow this example and so tell nothing. She pillowed Aylmer's head gently upon a coil of rope and stood up.

"The hope of rescue is gone then?" she said quietly. "There is no chance of their rounding the island, and encountering us later?"

He shrugged his shoulders doubtfully.

"They seldom carry search-lights--craft of that size, in the Spanish navy, at any rate. No, Muhammed's seamanship has taken the trick this time. Spanish captains do not waste coal lavishly, and what, after all, have they to go on. Merely the words 'Help! Prisoners!' It might easily have been the vagary of some half-drunken sponge-fisher."

She looked at him keenly.

"That was what he signalled?" she said. "You understood that?"

"I know the international code," he said simply. He looked down at Aylmer again. "His escapade has not improved our position," he added.

"When Landon comes to himself--"

"He is not seriously wounded, then?" she cried in quick disappointment.

"I had hoped--I had prayed--"

"What?" he asked, as she hesitated.

"That he had been killed," she answered slowly. "Is there any escape from the net of villainy in which he has us all entrapped?"

He looked at her silently, and the dawn of a hard smile glimmered about his lips. He pointed aft.

"Will you come and look?" he said. "Perhaps I have undervalued your prayers. I am no surgeon, but I would wager a larger sum on his reviving than I would on the recovery of--this."

He touched Aylmer with the point of his foot. There was no ungentleness in the action, but it seemed instinctive--the gesture of an autocrat or of a dictator, seeing all men under his feet.

She gave a gesture of a.s.sent and followed him into the gloom cast by the sail upon the stern. Landon lay within a foot of where he had fallen, his head pillowed upon a tarpaulin. Muhammed had relinquished the tiller to Captain Luigi and was dropping _aguardiente_ between the set lips and the color was stealing slowly back into the cheeks which had been as pale as Aylmer's own. Landon's eyes opened as Claire reached and stood beside him.

They met hers at first without recognition. Then a gleam of feeling flashed in them--a gleam which grew in fierceness as he gazed.

"I remember!" he muttered. He made a feeble effort to rise, which Muhammed prevented by the steady pressure of a hand. "By the Lord, he shall pay for it--and you!"

And then, meeting that glance, and stricken by the revulsion from the hope which the events of the last few minutes had engendered, Claire surrendered to a sense of despair. What could the future hold for her except--the worst? As far as she was concerned, the deal with fate was finished and she had lost finally. But even despair could not crush the maternal, protective instinct which had sprung into being in the silo of El Dibh, which had grown into full flower through the last dark hours in the lazaret. She spoke quickly, on the spur of the moment.

"Him you cannot hurt," she answered. "He is escaping you; he is dying."

Landon struggled under Muhammed's restraining hand.

"Is he?" he cried, looking at Miller. "Is he? He's not going before I get my hands on him! For G.o.d's sake, man, say he isn't! Say it isn't true!"

Miller shrugged his shoulders apathetically.

"We'll do all we can," he temporized.