He went to direct this, while we held our light squarely on the fleeing outlaw. Nobody was astir about her deck; indeed, so undisturbed did she appear that the sailor standing statue-like at her wheel might have been the only living thing aboard.
I breathed fast with thinking that maybe Sylvia might come up, and my senses were so alert, my mind, eyes, ears so intently reaching toward her, that now I heard what was indeed a most unexpected sound: a piano. Grasping Tommy's arm I whispered this to him, and he nodded, saying in a low tone:
"Yes, I hear it plainly. Reminds me of Monsieur's master musician playing a rhapsody in the dark, d'you remember? Listen! Gods, it's 'De puis le jour,' from Louise!" Yet in the next breath he added: "Cheerful girl you have, Jack,—she's switched off from her love song to Chopin's funeral march!"
I dolefully smiled to myself, not at the funeral march but at the realization that dreams are only dreams and nothing more, that Gates's common sense had come nearer hitting the mark than all of our professor's psychology; for I had seen no piano in that cabin, and five minutes ago I would have sworn its interior was as well known to me as the Whim. But an instant later my smile had given way to a cry of rage, as a little streak of fire spat from one of the portholes and the big lens of our searchlight, with a bang, shattered into a thousand pieces.
"The nerve of it," Tommy yelled, violently shaking his hand that had been resting on the brass frame. "Damn his hide, he nearly shot off my finger!"
"Are you hit?" I asked quickly.
"Hell, no; but my hand feels like a pincushion! Say, he knows how to shoot, though! I'll give him that much!"
"Those people are prepared for all that comes, I tell you," Monsieur vigorously nodded his head. "They must even have violet spectacles for looking into search-lights, else that fellow's eyes could not have stood the glare."
Again the Orchid was invisible. For a moment I thought that out of the dark sky my gods were derisively mocking me; but it was a human sound, a long, triumphant laugh, doubtless from the coarse-throated creature who had made the lucky shot.
Gates, fearing we might answer it in kind, came forward to counsel silence, at the same time sending a sailor for the megaphone and ordering another to extinguish our own lights. With his knife he then hastily cut the megaphone in half, keeping the large end whose openings now tapered from about eight inch to eighteen inch diameters. As we stood, not understanding what he meant to do, I heard across the water a rattling of blocks and knew the Orchid, free of pursuit, was changing her course. Gates cocked his head and listened, then whispered to the mate who went back and changed the Whim's course.