With one great lurch of his shoulders he turned over the empty boat and shoved it off into the sea. The first wave, catching it, drove it out of reach. “You won’t need that again,” he said.
With a half-uttered, sobbing gasp that no man had heard from his lips before, Knutsen sprang to rescue it. It was the greatest error of his life. Even he did not realize the full might and remorselessness of the foe that opposed him, or he would never have wasted precious seconds, put himself at a disadvantage by entering the water, in trying to retrieve the boat. He would have struck instantly, in one absolute, desperate attempt to wipe the danger forever from his path. But in the instant of need, his brain did not work true. He could not exclude from his thought the disastrous fallacy that all hope, all chances to escape from hell lay only in this flimsy craft, floating a few feet from him in shallow water.
In an instant he had seized it, and standing hip-deep in the icy water, he turned to face the blond man on the shore. The latter roared once with savage mirth, a sound that carried far abroad the snowy desolation; then he sobered, watching with glittering eyes.
“Let it go,” he ordered simply. His right arm lifted slowly, as if in inadvertence, and rested almost limp across his breast. His blond beard hid the contemptuous curl of his lips.
“Damn you, I won’t!” Knutsen answered. “You can’t keep us here——”
“Let it go, I say. You are the one that’s damned. And you fool, you don’t know the words that are written over the gates of the hell you’ve come to—‘Abandon hope, ye who enter here!’ You and your crowd will never leave this island till you die!”
Knutsen’s hand moved toward his hip. In the days of the gun fights, in the old North, it had never moved more swiftly. In this second of need he had remembered his pistol.
But he remembered it too late. And his hand, though fast, was infinitely slow. The great arm that lay across Doomsdorf’s breast suddenly flashed out and up. The blue steel of a revolver barrel streaked in the air, and a shot cracked over the sea.
Knutsen was already loosed from the bonds that held him. Deliverance had come quickly. His face, black before with wrath, grew blank; and for a long instant he groped impotently, open hands reaching. But the lead had gone straight home; and there was no need of a second shot. The late captain of the Charon swayed, then pitched forward into the gray waters.