The adventuress

by Arthur B. Reeve

Suddenly there came a spurt of water, a cloud of spray, like a geyser rising from the harbor. The Sybarite seemed to be lifted bodily out of the water and broken. Then she fell back and settled, bow foremost, heeling over, as she sank down to the mud and ooze of the bottom. The water closed over her and she was gone, nothing left but fragments of spars and woodwork which had been flung far and wide.

Through my mind ran the terrible details I had read of ships torpedoed without warning and the death and destruction of passengers. At least there were no women and children to add to this horror.

Kennedy slowed down his engine as we approached the floating wreckage, for there was not only the danger of our own frail little craft hitting something and losing rudder or propeller, but we could not tell what moment we might run across some of those on the yacht, if any had survived.

Other boats had followed us by this time, and we bent all our energies to the search, for pursuit of the scout cruiser was useless. There was not a craft in the harbor capable of overtaking one of her type, even in daylight. At night she was doubly safe from pursuit.

There was only one thing that we might accomplish—rescue. Would we be in time, would we be able to find Shelby? As my mind worked automatically over the entire swift succession of events of the past few days I recalled every moment we had been observing him, every action. I actually hated myself now for the unspoken suspicion of him that I had entertained. I could see that, though Kennedy had been able to promise him nothing openly, he had in reality been working in Shelby’s real interests.

There flashed through my mind a picture of Winifred. And at the same time the thought of what this all meant to her brought to me forcibly the events of the night before. One attack after another had been leveled against us, starting with the following and shooting at Hastings at our very laboratory door. Burke had been attacked. Then had come the attack on Kennedy, which had miscarried and struck me. Death had been leveled even at Mito, as though he had possessed some great secret. Next had come the attempted abduction of Winifred Walcott. And at last it had culminated in the most spectacular attack of all, on Shelby himself.

Try as I could by a process of elimination, I was unable to fix the guilt on any one in particular, even yet. Fixing guilt, however, was not what was needed now.

We had come into the area of the floating debris, and the possibility of saving life was all that need concern us. In the darkness I could make out cries, but they were hard to locate.

We groped about, trying hard to cover as much area as possible, but at the same time fearful of defeating our own purposes by striking some one with bow or propeller of our speed boat. Every now and then a piece of the wreckage would float by and we would scan it anxiously in mingled fear and hope that it would assume a human form as it became more clearly outlined. Each time that we failed we resumed the search with desperate determination.

“Look!” cried Burke, pointing at a wooden skylight that seemed to have been lifted from the deck and cast but into the waves, the glass broken, but the frame nearly intact. “What’s that on it?”