When he went up on deck he found the boat in utter darkness. To that slowly moving mass, for she was now drifting ahead under quarter-speed, this obliteration of light imparted a sense of stealthiness. This note of suspense, of watchfulness, of illicit adventure was reflected in the very tones of the motley deckhands who brushed past him in the humid velvety blackness.
As he stood at the rail, staring ahead through this blackness, Blake could see a light here and there along the horizon. These lights increased in number as the boat steamed slowly on. Then, far away in the roadstead ahead of them, he made out an entire cluster of lights, like those of a liner at anchor. Then he heard the tinkle of a bell below deck, and he realized that the engines had stopped.
In the lull of the quieted ship's screw he could hear the wash of distant surf, faint and phantasmal above the material little near-by boat-noises. Then came a call, faint and muffled, like the complaining note of a harbor gull. A moment later the slow creak of oars crept up to Blake's straining ears. Then out of the heart of the darkness that surrounded him, not fifty feet away, he saw emerge one faint point of light, rising and falling with a rhythm as sleepy as the slow creak of the oars. On each side of it other small lights sprang up. They were close beside the ship, by this time, a flotilla of lights, and each light, Blake finally saw, came from a lantern that stood deep in the bottom of a boat, a lantern that had been covered with a square of matting or sail-cloth, until some prearranged signal from the drifting steamer elicited its answering flicker of light. Then they swarmed about the oily water, shifting and swaying on their course like a cluster of fireflies, alternately dark and luminous in the dip and rise of the ground-swell. Within each small aura of radiance the watcher at the rail could see a dusky and quietly moving figure, the faded blue of a denim garment, the brown of bare arms, or the sinews of a straining neck. Once he caught the whites of a pair of eyes turned up towards the ship's deck. He could also see the running and wavering lines of fire as the oars puddled and backed in the phosphorescent water under the gloomy steel hull. Then he heard a low-toned argument in Spanish. A moment later the flotilla of small boats had fastened to the ship's side, like a litter of suckling pigs to a sow's breast. Every light went out again, every light except a faint glow as a guide to the first boat at the foot of the landing-ladder. Along this ladder Blake could hear barefooted figures padding and grunting as cases and bales were cautiously carried down and passed from boat to boat.
He swung nervously about as he felt a hand clutch his arm. He found Tankred speaking quietly into his ear.
"There 'll be one boat over," that worthy was explaining. "One boat—you take that—the last one! And you 'd better give the guinney a ten-dollar bill for his trouble!"
"All right! I 'm ready!" was Blake's low-toned reply as he started to move forward with the other man.
"Not yet! Not yet!" was the other's irritable warning, as Blake felt himself pushed back. "You stay where you are! We 've got a half-hour's hard work ahead of us yet!"
As Blake leaned over the rail again, watching and listening, he began to realize that the work was indeed hard, that there was some excuse for Tankred's ill-temper. Most men, he acknowledged, would feel the strain, where one misstep or one small mistake might undo the work of months. Beyond that, however, Blake found little about which to concern himself. Whether it was legal or illegal did not enter his mind. That a few thousand tin-sworded soldiers should go armed or unarmed was to him a matter of indifference. It was something not of his world. It did not impinge on his own jealously guarded circle of activity, on his own task of bringing a fugitive to justice. And as his eyes strained through the gloom at the cluster of lights far ahead in the roadstead he told himself that it was there that his true goal lay, for it was there that the Trunella must ride at anchor and Binhart must be.
Then he looked wonderingly back at the flotilla under the rail, for he realized that every movement and murmur of life there had come to a sudden stop. It was a cessation of all sound, a silence as ominously complete as that of a summer woodland when a hawk soars overhead. Even the small light deep in the bottom of the first lancha tied to the landing-ladder had been suddenly quenched.
Blake, staring apprehensively out into the gloom, caught the sound of a soft and feverish throbbing. His disturbed mind had just registered the conclusion that this sound must be the throbbing of a passing marine-engine, when the thought was annihilated by a second and more startling occurrence.