Van Dyck gripped his club. "We mustn't let them get away, or get together again!" he rapped out. "Wait until I give the word!"—and as the four runners were about to pass our hiding place—"Now!"
What I did had to be done on the spur of the moment. At the climaxing instant, I flung my arms around him and dragged him down and held him helpless; at which it was only natural that he should fall to cursing me like a fishwife.
"You fool!" I panted, when I had the breath to spare. "Let them go! They'll come back. Don't you hear that wind coming? The yacht will be lost if she hangs on outside of that reef five minutes longer!"
As I let him get up, a hurtling volley of great raindrops tore through the foliage over our heads, and a blast, carrying with it the dank, unwholesome breath of an upheaved watery underworld, swept across the surface of the lagoon. Like mad-men the racing four hurled themselves into the waiting yawl, the boat shoved off, and with the men at the oars pulling with much more energy than skill, a frantic dash was made for the passage through the reef.
It bade fair to be a shrewd case of touch and go; an open question as to whether or not the yawl could reach the yacht before the yacht would have to claw off the island in sheer self-preservation. Dark as it had grown, we could see the black smoke of freshly fueled fires pouring from the Andromeda's funnels to be caught up and whirled away to leeward, and above the shrieking of the blast we could hear the trampling chant of her powerful engines. Whoever was in command was proving himself a daring captain. With a Caribbean hurricane fairly upon him, and a jagged reef lying within a cable's length, he was backing and filling and holding his ground stubbornly to give the yawl, tossing now like a cockleshell on a heaving sea which was already surging over the reef, time to reach him.
Van Dyck burst out in an ecstasy of rage.
"Damn him!" he yelled, apostrophizing the unknown manoeuverer on the Andromeda's bridge, "he'll put the yacht on the rocks, and that'll be the end of all of us!"
It certainly looked that way. More rain was coming, not in huge drops, as at first, but in a fine, mist-like spray, driving horizontally and drenching instantly everything it touched. Though the rising moon was completely blotted out by the rain and the high cloud wrack, there was still light enough in the open to enable us to see the Andromeda and the yawl. The returning boat's crew seemed fully alive to the need for haste; the men at the oars were splashing mightily and digging deep. But enthusiasm, even the enthusiasm of fear, is but a poor substitute for mariner skill. The little boat had safely negotiated the dangerous reef passage and was half-way out to the yacht when an oar broke, and it could have been only the cleverest dexterity on the part of the helmsman that kept the yawl from falling into the trough of the rising seas and capsizing when the man at the broken oar tumbled over backward and so crippled for the moment the remainder of the yawl's motive power.
But the small accident settled matters definitely for the yacht's captain, whoever he was. As if the snapping ash had been the signal for which he was waiting—and a convincing proof that it was no use for him to wait any longer—he called for full speed ahead, jammed his helm hard down, and with a lurch to port so abrupt that it seemed as if it must surely put her upon her beam ends, the Andromeda fled, vanishing like a white wraith in the spume and smother to leeward, and leaving the luckless landing party to do what it pleased, or could, toward saving itself.