Out across the blackness in front of him suddenly flashed a white saber of light. For one moment it circled and wavered restlessly about, feeling like a great finger along the gray surface of the water. Then it smote full on Blake and the deck where he stood, blinding him with its glare, picking out every object and every listening figure as plainly as a calcium picks out a scene on the stage.
Without conscious thought Blake dropped lower behind the ship's rail. He sank still lower, until he found himself down on his hands and knees beside a rope coil. As he did so he heard the call of a challenging Spanish voice, a murmur of voices, and then a repeated command.
There was no answer to this challenge. Then came another command and then silence again. Then a faint thrill arrowed through Blake's crouching body, for from somewhere close behind him a gun-shot rang out and was repeated again and again. Blake knew, at that sound, that Tankred or one of his men was firing straight into the dial of the searchlight, that Tankred himself intended to defy what must surely be an Ecuadorean gunboat. The detective was oppressed by the thought that his own jealously nursed plan might at any moment get a knock on the head.
At almost the same time the peevishly indignant Blake could hear the tinkle of the engine-room bell below him and then the thrash of the screw wings. The boat began to move forward, dangling the knocking and rocking flotilla of lanchas and surf-boats at her side, like a deer-mouse making off with its young. Then came sharp cries of protest, in Spanish, and more cries and curses in harbor-English, and a second engine-room signal and a cessation of the screw thrashings. This was followed by a shower of carbine-shots and the plaintive whine of bullets above the upper-works, the crack and thud of lead against the side-plates. At the same time Blake heard the scream of a denim-clad figure that suddenly pitched from the landing-ladder into the sea. Then came an answering volley, from somewhere close below Blake. He could not tell whether it was from the boat-flotilla or from the port-holes above it. But he knew that Tankred and his men were returning the gunboat's fire.
Blake, by this time, was once more thinking lucidly. Some of the cases in those surf-boats, he remembered, held giant-caps and dynamite, and he knew what was likely to happen if a bullet struck them. He also remembered that he was still exposed to the carbine fire from behind the searchlight.
He stretched out, flat on the deck-boards, and wormed his way slowly and ludicrously aft. He did not bring those uncouth vermiculations to a stop until he was well back in the shelter of a rusty capstan, cut off from the light by a lifeboat swinging on its davits. As he clambered to his feet again he saw this light suddenly go out and then reappear. As it did so he could make out a patrol-boat, gray and low-bodied, slinking forward through the gloom. He could see that boat crowded with men, men in uniform, and he could see that each man carried a carbine. He could also see that it would surely cut across the bow of his own steamer. A moment later he knew that Tankred himself had seen this, for high above the crack and whine of the shooting and the tumult of voices he could now hear Tankred's blasphemous shouts.
"Cut loose those boats!" bellowed the frantic gun-runner. Then he repeated the command, apparently in Spanish. And to this came an answering babel of cries and expostulations and counter-cries. But still the firing from behind the searchlight kept up. Blake could see a half-naked seaman with a carpenter's ax skip monkey-like down the landing-ladder. He saw the naked arm strike with the ax, the two hands suddenly catch at the bare throat, and the figure fall back in a huddle against the red-stained wooden steps.
Blake also saw, to his growing unrest, that the firing was increasing in volume, that at the front of the ship sharp volley and counter-volley was making a pandemonium of the very deck on which he knelt. For by this time the patrol-boat with the carbineers had reached the steamer's side and a boarding-ladder had been thrown across her quarter. And Blake began to comprehend that he was in the most undesirable of situations. He could hear the repeated clang of the engine-room telegraph and Tankred's frenzied and ineffectual bellow of "Full steam ahead! For the love o' Christ, full ahead down there!"
Through all that bedlam Blake remained resentfully cool, angrily clear-thoughted. He saw that the steamer did not move forward. He concluded the engine-room to be deserted. And he saw both the futility and the danger of remaining where he was.
He crawled back to where he remembered the rope-coil lay, dragging the loose end of it back after him, and then lowering it over the ship's side until it touched the water. Then he shifted this rope along the rail until it swung over the last of the line of surf-boats that bobbed and thudded against the side-plates of the gently rolling steamer. About him, all the while, he could hear the shouts of men and the staccato crack of the rifles. But he saw to it that his rope was well tied to the rail-stanchion. Then he clambered over the rail itself, and with a double twist of the rope about his great leg let himself ponderously down over the side.