The Pursuit Part 52

"All is well, Signor. It remains to get our merchandise ash.o.r.e."

Landon became aware of a blue speck of light in the darkness--a speck which wavered, grew to a suddenly unexpected point of brightness and disappeared. So quickly did it come and go, so evanescent was its effect, that none but those who searched for it would have been likely to give its appearance a second thought. It might have been caused by the pa.s.sing of a candle behind one of the many panes of frosted gla.s.s which disfigure Italian villas in _villeggiatura_.

Luigi gave an order. The two deck hands clutched the halliards. The sail was lowered. A moment later the anchor set the ripples herding towards the sh.o.r.e as it plunged into the calm below the jetty. Landon and his companion descended to the cabin.

Stretched on a bunk was Miller, sleeping the sleep of the justly tired.

He roused himself at their touch and sat up. He looked about him meditatively.

"The wind has dropped, absolutely?" he said. "Since when?"

"Half an hour ago. We are in port," said Landon. "We are ready to land, when you will."

The gray man smoothed the creases in his gray coat.

"When _I_ will?" he repeated. "I am a prisoner--the captive of your bow and spear." He smiled with sombre sarcasm.

"That position is to be maintained?" asked Landon.

"Naturally. Your cousin may make my continued residence in Gibraltar well-nigh impossible, otherwise."

"My cousin?" Landon repeated the words with a certain doubtfulness. "He is my cousin," he said slowly, "and we sha'n't break one of his blood except in one way. It's the girl, remember, that is our strong suit.

There's to be no bleating about that. To win, the trick has to be taken with her alone."

Miller nodded woodenly.

"If I had the inclination to interfere, I have not the power," he said.

"Do you forget that I am a prisoner, like herself?"

"Yes," said Landon, and there was more than doubt in his expression this time, there was suspicion. "I forget it all the time. I want your a.s.surance that _you_ won't!"

Miller made a gesture of a.s.sent.

"Let's get on," he said. "I understand that it's within a couple of hours of dawn."

For an instant Landon hesitated. Then, with Luigi at his heels, he entered the lazaret. Neither of them spoke. They bent and lifted Aylmer methodically, holding him by his shoulders and his lashed ankles. They bore him on deck. They gagged him with the cork float of a fishing-net and left him, stark and motionless as a log. They turned back to the cabin, and a minute later placed Claire Van Arlen beside him, as helpless as himself.

The dingy--a new one, picked up in the island--was lowered. The prisoners were thrust beneath the seats. A deck hand and Muhammed took their places at the oars. Luigi steered; the child, half asleep and wrapped in a blanket, drowsed at his feet. Miller and Landon sat on the thwarts.

The two rowers dipped their oars without splashing in long, slow strokes. The thole-pins were m.u.f.fled with rags. The boat stole along in the shadow of the jetty into the darkness which hid the port. It was noiseless, ghost-like, this entry into the little haven. To the two dumb prisoners who lay along the bottom of the boat it was ominous of hope entirely lost.

They stifled under the cloaks which hid them; the perspiration dripped from the rowers, despite the unhurried nature of their work. The weight of a dozen atmospheres seemed to have replaced the exhilarating breath which Sicily flings seaward from her sun-brimmed sh.o.r.es. Luigi, at the helm, gasped and pa.s.sed his hand across his eyes.

"Thunder in December! Not natural, Signor, but that is what we must expect. I suffocate. _Per Dio!_ The bay is an oven."

He let the prow nose in towards the jetty. Moored boats began to appear dimly, right and left of them. The lamplight from the Marina showed an empty quay. Luigi steered for the shadow cast by a shed, and took the ground silently on a strand of mud and garbage.

The deck hand drew in his oar and skipped nimbly ash.o.r.e. Muhammed followed him. They both laid their hands upon the painter. They bent their backs to haul.

Two shadows appeared right and left of them, shadows which seemed to have detached themselves from the framework of the shed. Something clicked. A yellow beam flared out, full on Luigi's face.

He gasped, he yelled.

"G.o.d's Mother--the Carbineers!"

Landon leaped to his feet with a curse. He seized an oar; he thrust with all his strength at the mud. And at the same moment the two on the sh.o.r.e, struggling in their captor's hands, let fall the painter. The boat shot out stern foremost into deep water.

From the sh.o.r.e came the sound of a struggle and then Muhammed's voice, shrill in explanation.

"_Signori! Signori!_ I am not a contrabandist! I am a tourist; I can prove it; I wish to offer no resistance; I place myself in your hands, freely."

There was a grim laugh, and then the yellow beam of light which had been withdrawn while the struggle proceeded, flung out its level rays again and illuminated the boat.

"Surrender, Luigi!" shouted a stern voice. There was another click.

"Surrender, _stupido_! I have you covered; I give you five seconds before I fire!"

The shrill voice of the captured sailor reinforced the argument.

"It is over--finished," he shouted pessimistically. "It is _Pinale_; there is nothing more to be done!"

Luigi groaned and then flung up his hands.

"I give in!" he cried, and burst into a storm of hysterical sobs. "It means Procida--this," he wept. "It means years in chains; it means half the rest of my life s.n.a.t.c.hed from me." He turned and smote at Landon in the darkness. "I owe it to you, tempter!" he yelled. "Accursed of G.o.d, you led me into this!"

Landon stumbled in his surprise and then leaped at him like a cat. There was a shrill scream from the child as the swaying pair rolled down upon the stern sheets, gripping, each of them, for the other's throat. The boat rocked violently.

Again the stern command from the sh.o.r.e rang into the night. They gave it no heed. Animal rage possessed them; they were no longer men but beasts, fighting with hand and foot and knee, clawing, tearing, even biting as the chance of conflict brought Luigi's lips within reach of his a.s.sailant's cheek. They were lost to all human warning or control.

It was no human interference which separated them.

Fate played her hand--played it irresistibly, crushingly, played it with a vindictive completeness such as even she has never used since her grip fell upon her plaything--that toy of hers among a million million toys, and which we call our world.

A roar, terrific, growing, menacing, filling the echoes, br.i.m.m.i.n.g the heavy air, rolling out across the still waters of the bay, thundered into the silence of the sh.o.r.e. The dim lamps upon the Marina shook; crash upon crash echoed from buildings which could not be seen, but which terror could picture in all the crude pigments of imagination and despair! Beside the boat a huge crack rent the jetty in twain. Stones, dashed from the crumbling buildings in the darkness, flung huge gouts of spray over the two who wrenched themselves apart in her stern, over their prisoners, over the child, who cried aloud in all the agony of childish fear.

And then human voices joined the chorus--voices which expressed every intonation of panic, of the horror which is built upon amazement, of the unleashed emotions of men awaking to meet blindly the common hazards of life and confronting chaos, illimitable ruin, a sudden unbarring of the gates of h.e.l.l.

The struggle in the boat ceased. Wild curses became, on Luigi's lips, a string of piteous appeals to the very saints whose names he had used a moment before to point his blasphemies. Miller and Landon grasped the oars.

But even the terrors of earthquake do not wreck the discipline of Italy's Carbineers. The sergeant's warning was repeated thunderously.

Miller screamed an a.s.sent, a surrender. Landon answered with an oath.

The one endeavored to propel the boat sh.o.r.ewards, the other towards the sea. It spun between their efforts; they yelled and gesticulated madly.

And again the sergeant's voice was heard, with a hundred other voices, appealing to a G.o.d whose mercy was surely turned away.

For a moaning sound _tingled_ along the strand, and then silently, but with the speed of a cataract, the sea sank back from the sh.o.r.e.

It plucked half a hundred boats from their anchorages; it gripped them down into its trough. For full thirty seconds they fled upon this monstrous tide of a tideless sea, hull crashing against hull, mast beating against mast, a wrecked wilderness of spars and rigging, tangled, coiled, the froth, the sc.u.m, as it were, upon that mighty crest. And behind them went the _Santa Margarita's_ dingy, with bound and free in equal helplessness.

Then, as if the sluice of some Cyclopean lock had been shut, the mighty mill-race halted and a mountain grew upon the face of the deep. Huge, black, awesome, it swung itself up, swelled higher and higher, hung through an aeon-long moment of horror, and then rolled back whence it had come. And the menace of its coming left no tiniest coign of foothold for hope in its path. Irresistible and relentless it moved along to destroy every barrier of nature, every man-built obstacle with its might. Its foam-plumed crest roared over the quayside and the Marina five fathoms deep.