It is probably a rare thing for a crisis in the affairs of a group of nearly a score of people to turn upon so trivial a matter as the tobacco habit. There was still an unburned dottel in my pipe, and I could not think of wasting it. If I had not stopped and felt in my pockets for my one remaining match while the professor was still a trudging shadow on the white sands of the northern beach, the crisis might have come and gone undiscovered by any soul of our eighteen.
For, just as I had found the match and was in the act of striking it, the ghost-like bulk of a ship loomed silently in the starlight a short half-mile to the eastward; a ship headed directly for the island and showing no lights. It was the Andromeda again.
XV
THE MERRY WAR
Putting the unlighted match carefully away in my pocket, I made a quick dash down the north beach to overtake the professor.
I told him what I had seen, and he exclaimed, "Dear me—you don't say so!" much as if I had rushed up to assure him that the exact value of pi in the circle-squaring problem had finally been ascertained. And then, quite placidly: "What do we do next, Mr. Preble?"
I didn't want to tell him that, in all probability, the Andromeda mutineers were merely coming back to dig for gold. That was still Van Dyck's personal secret. But it was not difficult to convince him that the yacht's errand was not friendly to us.
"They are creeping up quietly, at the wrong end of the island, and with no lights showing," I pointed out. "Which means that they are not coming to take us off. If you will stay here and keep in touch with them while I run back to camp and give the alarm——"
"Certainly," he agreed. Then: "I'm not to show myself?"