For answer there came from the space where the dynamite was stored, a tiny splutter, not unlike the splutter which is given occasionally by a badly-trimmed lamp.
We had not been in time to prevent him carrying out his devilish purpose after all! And I—blind fool that I was—had been listening idly to his chatter, not knowing that every word which fell from his lips was bringing nearer the certainty of a dreadful fate.
This was why he had forced himself to smile and wear a mask, was it?
But the mask was off now, for catching sight of the horror in my face as I leapt to my feet, he raised himself on his arm, and glared at me with a countenance contorted out of all human likeness by devilish hate and exultation.
“You’re too late, you ——! You’re too late. We’re going to hell together, and if there’s a deeper hell still, I’ll seize you with a grip you can’t shake off, and leap with you into the eternal fire. You sha’n’t escape me there any more than you have here, for we’ll burn together! You’re too late! you’re too——”
His voice died away in the distance, for I was by this time in the dinghy, and rowing as man never rowed before. Thank God, I was already ten yards away—twenty, fifty, a hundred!
Suddenly the sea behind me seemed to open up in one sheet of purple flame, and I was knocked backward out of the boat as if by a blow from a clenched fist. Then it seemed as if the sea had picked me up in its arms—as I had once seen a drink-maddened man pick up a child, whom he afterwards dashed headforemost against a brick wall—and had flung me away and away over the very world’s edge.
When I came to myself I was lying high and dry upon the Kentish coast, carried there, no doubt, by the huge wave that had followed the explosion.
Captain Shannon had been arrested at last, and by an officer who, for your crimes and mine, reader,—be they few or many, trivial or great,—is now hunting each of us down to bring us to justice.