But Billy's remark about the inquiry for weapons was news of a sort. Had Van Dyck caught a fresh glimpse of the Andromeda's smoke plume on the horizon he was always sweeping with the field-glass?
"Bonteck wasn't trying to disarm anybody, was he?" I asked.
"Oh, no. He talked sort of vaguely about a scrap of some kind, and being prepared for it; wanted to know if the professor and Grey and Dupuyster and I would put ourselves under orders, and do what he might tell us to, sight unseen. Said maybe he'd be able to explain more fully a little later on."
I thought I saw what was in Van Dyck's mind. His secret was gnawing the life out of him, and, sooner or later, it would have to come out. I knew well enough that he was not hesitating from any cowardly motive; it was rather because I had urged him to wait, holding out the hope that a more auspicious time for the telling of the plot would come—or at least that a less auspicious time than this starvation period could hardly come.
In the waiting interval, and as in some sense still our host and leader, he had been obliged to busy himself with something, and apart from the daily effort to make the hardships less grinding upon all of us, and the women in particular, he had organized the six of us men who were willing into four-hour watches of two men each to patrol the two beaches, urging our daily decreasing food supply as a reason for the increased vigilance, and insisting that we must not allow the smallest chance of discovery to escape us. If a ship were sighted in the night, the two watchers making the discovery were to arouse the other four instantly, and without giving a general alarm.
Though he had not confided it to me in detail, his plan was obvious enough. He was still expecting another return of the Andromeda, and was determined to make a desperate effort to regain possession of the yacht when the chance should offer. For this attempt, hazardous as it would surely prove to be, he could count definitely upon only six of our nine. Barclay was certainly out of it, and the major's age exempted him. Ingerson was a doubtful quantity—very doubtful from my point of view—and I questioned if Van Dyck would call upon him or make him a party to any plan that might be determined upon when the time for action should arrive. Still, outnumbered as we must be, a recapture of the yacht appeared to be our only hope. We might all starve a thousand times over before any chance ship should sight our isolated island; sight it and approach near enough to make out our distress signals.
Just how much or how little Van Dyck would confess to the others, if a time should come when he would no longer be able to keep silence, was a question that was puzzling me. To tell the assembled castaways that there had probably been a real mutiny where only a sham one was intended would cut no figure as news, since sixteen of our eighteen already believed it to have been real. That being the case, the only encouraging thing to be revealed was the burial of the golden hoard, and the reasonable hope it gave us that the Andromeda would come back, sooner or later, in order to search for it.
As to this, however, I was quite confident that Bonteck would never go so far as to tell the others about the gold planting. That he would publish the bald truth about his generous and lover-like little plot, the object of which was to enable Madeleine Barclay to buy her freedom of choice in matters matrimonial, was simply unthinkable. And if the gold-burying episode were to be left out of his confession, in what other manner could he account to the others for his belief that the yacht would eventually return?
As it came about, the answers to all these questioning reflections were already marshaling themselves for a descent upon us at the moment when I was undertaking to show Billy Grisdale that a man's eyes should be kept decently shuttered when his brain is conjuring up pictures of the terrible things that may happen to the loved one.