CHAPTER XXIV
THE ALARM
Unaware of the possible tragedy that was being developed within a few hundred yards of them, Tyke and Captain Hamilton had kept on digging in the excavation. For Tyke had refused to be kept out of the work of recovering the treasure, and when Drew had strolled off with the intention of discovering what had frightened Ruth and had been followed shortly after by the latter, the old man had seized Drew's abandoned shovel and had gone lustily to work.
"Too much of a strain on that game leg of yours to be heaving up those shovelfuls," the captain protested.
"Nary a bit of it," answered Tyke. "I ain't ready to be put on the shelf yet, not by a blamed sight, and I guess if it came to a showdown, Rufe, my muscles are as good as yours."
"You're a tough old knot all right," admitted Captain Hamilton, his eyes twinkling. "But there's no sense in your doing Allen's work. Where in thunder has the boy gone anyway?"
"Oh, he'll turn up in a minute or two," returned Tyke. "Wherever he is you can bet your boots he's doing something connected with this here work of treasure seeking. It simply ain't in that boy to lay down on any job."
"Drew makes a hit with you all right," laughed the captain.
"And why shouldn't he?" asked Tyke belligerently. "He's been with me for some years now, and I've had plenty of chances of sizin' him up. If there was a yellow streak in him, I'd have found it out long ago. If I'd had a son of my own, I wouldn't have asked for him to be any better fellow than Allen is, and nobody could say any more'n that. He's got grit an' brains an' gumption, an' more'n that he's as straight as a string."
"Go ahead," laughed the captain, as Tyke paused for want of breath. "Don't let me stop you."
"I don't mind tellin' you, Rufe, what I've never told yet to any human soul," continued Tyke, waxing confidential, "an' that is that when I lay up in my last harbor, Allen is goin' to come into everything I've got. He don't know it himself yet, but I've got it down shipshape in black and white an' the paper's in my office safe."
"He's a lucky fellow," commented the captain briefly.
"An' let me tell you another thing, Rufe," said Tyke, "an' that is that Allen would make not only a good son, but a mighty good son-in-law."
He nudged the captain in the ribs as he spoke, with the familiarity of old comradeship.
"Lay off on that, Tyke," said the captain, flushing a little beneath his bronze.
"You don't mean to say that you haven't seen the way the wind was blowin'?" rejoined Tyke incredulously. "Why, any one with a pair of good eyes in his head can't help but see that those two are just made for each other."
"I'm not blind, of course," returned the captain, who now that the ice was broken seemed not averse to talking the matter over with his old comrade. "I know of course that I can't keep Ruth forever and that some time some fellow will lay me aboard and carry her off right from under my guns. And I'm not denying that up to a few days ago, I'd rather it would have been young Drew than any one else. But now—" here he paused.
"Well, but now," repeated Tyke.
"You know just as well as I do what I'm meaning," blurted out Captain Hamilton. "This matter of Parmalee's death has got to be cleared up before I'd even consider him in connection with Ruth. You can't blame me for that, Tyke."
The old man's face clouded.
"I ain't exactly blaming you, Rufe," he conceded, for despite his ardent partisanship of Allen, he could realize how Captain Hamilton as a parent must feel; "but I'm mortal sure that thing will be cleared up before long. You know just as well as I do that Allen didn't kill Parmalee any more than you or I did."
"That's what I want to believe," returned the captain. "I mean," he corrected, as he saw the choleric flash in Tyke's eyes, "that's what I do believe."
"It's that scoundrel, Ditty, that did it himself," growled Tyke savagely. "He cooked up the whole thing and then shoved it off on Allen. You've seen enough of him since then to know that he's capable of anything."
"Yes," admitted the captain, "he's a dirty dog. But don't you see, Tyke, that even allowing that Allen is innocent, he's been charged with doing it. And to lots of people, that's just about the same as though he were actually guilty. Then, too, the matter will have to be tried out in the courts. Allen will have to stand trial and even if he gets off, as I hope he will, there'll be a cloud on his name as long as he lives. How could I let Ruth marry a man who had been charged with murder and who got off because there wasn't evidence enough to convict?"
"Mebbe Ruth would be willing to take the chance," persisted Tyke stubbornly.
"Maybe she would," agreed the captain, "but she'd never do it with my consent. She's too good and sweet and pretty a girl to link her life with a man whose name was smirched. I wouldn't stand for it for a minute."
Tyke was framing a reply when suddenly the earthquake which wrought such dire results to the two of whom they were speaking shook the ground. The two men were thrown against each other and both went in a heap to the bottom of the ditch. The breath was knocked out of their bodies, and every thought was driven from their minds except the instinctive desire to remain alive until nature's onslaught had ceased.
When the worst was over, they scrambled to their feet, brushed the dirt from their clothes and faces, and stared grimly at each other.
"If it didn't seem too conceited to think that all this fuss was being made on our account," growled the captain, as he picked up his spade. "I'd surely make up my mind that something was trying to shoo us away from this treasure hunting."
"Yes," agreed Tyke. "Now, if I was superstitious—"
"I wonder," broke in the captain with sudden alarm, as he thought of the two errant members of the party, "where Ruth and Allen were when this quake happened."
"The only safe thing is to say that they were together somewhere," said Tyke. "I notice that they're never far apart. Don't you worry, Rufe. Allen will take good care of her."
But the captain was already climbing out of the excavation. He gave Tyke a hand and helped him up.
"Where did you last see them, Tyke?" Hamilton asked, as his eyes scanned the surrounding landscape without catching a glimpse of the figures he sought.
"The last I saw of Allen he was going down toward them trees," replied Tyke, indicating a corner of the jungle, "an' a little later, out o' the corner of my eye, I saw Ruth going in the same direction. Now, don't fret, Rufe. They'll turn up as right as a trivet in another minute or two."
"The jungle!" gasped the captain in alarm. "Don't you see, Tyke, that some of those trees have been shaken down. Maybe they've been caught under one of them. Hurry! hurry!"
He set off, running hurriedly, and Tyke hastened after him as fast as he could.
They were soon at the jungle's edge. Several giant trees had fallen victims to the earthquake's wrath, but a frantic searching among their trunks revealed no traces of the missing ones.
The captain wiped his brow and gave a great sigh of relief.
"So far, so good!" he exclaimed. "They've escaped that danger anyway. I had a fearful scare. I don't mind admitting that my heart was in my mouth for a minute."
"Same here," assented Tyke, who despite his faith in Drew's resourcefulness had secretly shared the captain's alarm. "But if they're not here, where in Sam Hill can they be?"
They raised their voices in a shout, but no answering sound came back.
Several times they repeated the call, but all to no purpose.
"Strange," muttered the captain uneasily. "It isn't like Ruth to go off to any distance without telling me about it beforehand."
"Nor Allen neither," put in Tyke loyally.
"You might almost think the earth had swallowed them up," pursued the captain, little thinking how near he was to guessing the truth.
"Well, the only thing to do is to keep looking for 'em until we find 'em," said Tyke. "You take that side of the hill, Rufe, and I'll take the other. We'll come across them probably before we meet up with each other."
The two men separated on their quest, calling out at frequent intervals. It did not take them long to skirt the base of the whale's hump, but when at last they met each saw only disappointment and a growing alarm in the eyes of the other.
"We'll have to try it again and make a wider circle," exclaimed Hamilton desperately. "We've simply got to come across them somewhere around here."
"Of course we shall," said Tyke heartily, though the crease in his forehead belied the confidence of his words.
Once more they made the round of the hump, this time ranging out much further from the base. Still their efforts were fruitless, and when they met once more, neither tried to disguise from the other the growing panic in his heart.
"Ruth, Ruth!" groaned the captain.
"Come now, Rufe, brace up," comforted Tyke. "While there's life there's hope."
"That's just it," replied the captain. "But how do we know there is life? Something serious must have happened to them, or they'd never stay away like this. They'd know we'd be worried about them after that shock came and they couldn't have come back to us quick enough, if they'd been able to come."
Tyke could not deny the force of this.
"Well now, Rufe, let's get down to the bottom of this," he said. "I'm afraid just as you be that they're in trouble of some kind. Now what could make trouble for them on this island? There ain't any wild beasts of any account here, do you think?"
"Not that I ever heard of," replied the captain. "We're too far south for mountain lions and too far north for jaguars. There may be an occasional wildcat, but it wouldn't be likely to attack a single person let alone two together. There may be snakes here though for all I know."
"Nothing doing there," said Tyke decisively. "Mebbe there's boas, but if so there're a mild and harmless kind, such as those they make household pets of in some places to keep away the rats. And if there are any poisonous snakes, it's against all likehood that both Ruth and Allen would be bitten. One of them would come scurrying to us at once for help for the other.
"Besides," he went on, "I know that Allen had his revolver along with him and he's a sure shot. No, I don't think we have to worry about animals or snakes."
"What is there left then?" groaned the captain.
"There's two things left," replied Tyke reflectively. "One of 'em is old nature herself. What she can do is a plenty, as we've seen since we come to this island——."
"This infernal island," broke in the captain viciously. "I wish to heaven we'd never seen it. I wish some one of these earthquakes had sent it to the bottom of the sea."
"I don't blame you much," assented Tyke. "But being here, we've got to take things as they come. Now, as I was saying, old nature may have taken a hand in causing trouble for the two young folks. But for the life of me I don't see how. We've already seen that they weren't caught under those falling trees. And there didn't any lava flow come with that last quake. And that being so I can't see where nature's got into the game.
"Now," he continued, "there's just one thing left—and that's men! There may be some natives on this island that feel sore at our butting in on 'em and they may have come across them youngsters and captured 'em."
"I don't think that's at all likely," rejoined the captain. "There'd certainly have been some sign of them, some boat, some hut or something else of the kind. But we haven't seen hide or hair of anything since we landed. The boat's crew, too, have been roaming over the island and they'd have reported to us anything they'd seen that looked as though people lived in this God-forsaken spot."
"Yes," assented Tyke. "And it stands to reason that Allen with his automatic would have put up a fight and we'd have heard the sound of shots. But there are other men besides natives on the island."
"What do you mean?" asked the captain in surprise.
"I mean Ditty and his gang of water rats," replied Tyke.
"You don't think that skunk would dare—" spluttered the captain.
"I think that one-eyed rascal would dare almost anything," answered Tyke. "And it struck me as barely possible that he might have come sneaking around to see what we were doing and perhaps run across Allen and Ruth. There's bad blood there, as you know, and it wouldn't take much to bring about a scrap.
"Not that I think that has happened," he went on, "because it isn't likely that Ditty's plans are far enough forward yet for him to show his hand. Still I may be wrong. I tell you what I think you'd better do. You can git around faster than I can with this old game leg of mine. Suppose you run back to the shore and see if Ditty is hanging around there. If he is and everything seems shipshape we can leave him out of our calculations. Then we'll have to figure out what we're to do next."
It was grasping at straws, but in their utter ignorance of the real facts they had nothing but straws to grasp at. The captain set off hurriedly, while Tyke went once more around the mountain base in the forlorn hope that this time something tangible would come to reward his efforts.
Once he thought he heard something that sounded like shots and he stopped short in his tracks. His old eyes, keen yet, despite his years, looked eagerly around. But as far as his eyes could reach there was nothing to be seen, and he came to the conclusion that he must have imagined the sounds or that they were caused by some rumbling of the earth.
In a surprisingly short time, the captain was back, panting and winded by his exertions.
"Well," asked Tyke eagerly, "did you find out anything?"
"The men were all huddled down on the shore evidently scared out of their wits. I guess we can cross them off our slate. But how about you? Did you find any clue?"
"Nary a thing," answered Tyke dejectedly. "I thought at one time that I heard shots, but when I come to look it up there was nothing in it."
"We must find them!" cried the captain excitedly, pacing back and forth like a wild animal and digging his nails into his palms as he clenched his fists in anguish. "We'll go over every foot of this island. I'll get out every man on the ship and set him to work searching."
"I wouldn't do that—at least not yit," adjured Tyke, laying his hand on the captain's arm. "Of course we may have to do that as a last resort. But you know what sailors are, an' we don't want to have 'em cracking their jokes 'bout Allen an' Ruth going off together. Wait a bit. The day's young yet an' they may turn up any time of their own accord. In the meantime, we'll explore places that we haven't tried before an' mebbe we'll run across 'em. If everything else fails, then we'll turn out every man jack of the crew and go over every inch of the island."
To the agonized father, everything that savored of delay seemed intolerable, but he yielded to the wisdom of Tyke's suggestion and once more they started out in their desperate search.