"For playing fast and loose with Conetta. He has asked her, you know, and she has said 'Yes.' And in spite of that, he has been making open love to Beatrice Van Tromp ever since we were put ashore here."
"Don't make a damned jealous idiot of yourself!" was the hot retort. "If you weren't bat-blind in both eyes——"
The interruption was the thunderous racket we had by this time given up all hope of hearing. With a mighty splash and a deafening clamor from the paying-out cable, the Andromeda's starboard anchor let go, and from the shortness of the uproar we knew that it had taken ground upon the outer ledges of the reef. Following the rattling clamor, we heard the pad-pad of running men, and were able to guess that the slack discipline of the mutineers had been responsible for a deserted forward deck. There was a barked-out order in a foreign tongue from the bridge, a hissing of steam, and the power capstan was promptly set in motion to break the anchor out of its hold.
At the second or third turn of the capstan something happened; a snapping explosion up forward, and a prolonged hammering and grinding, as if the steam hoisting machinery were patiently and painstakingly wrecking itself. In the midst of this new turmoil we saw a slender white figure shoot over the yacht's bow in a headlong dive, and heard the crackling spatter of a pistol fusillade opened upon the diver from the bridge.
"We'll hang the last living man of them if they got him!" Van Dyck declared vindictively, when the velvety silence of the tropical night had settled down again, and we had looked earnestly but in vain for some sign of the diver from the yacht's bows. Then he turned to Grey: "Jack, you'd better drop out and run back to camp. It is hardly possible that the women are sleeping through all this war noise. You'll know what to say. Tell them to keep together and to make no noise. They're out of the danger zone, and we'll make it our business to try to prevent the scrapping from drifting down to that end of the island. Don't say anything about Jerry. We won't give him up until we have to. That's all; but hurry back. We'll probably be needing you by the time you've made the round trip."
Grey slipped off silently, doubling the sandspit point of the island in order to have the unmenaced north beach for his speedway. After he was gone there was a terrible wait for the four of us left crouching in the shadow of the palms. For what seemed like an age there was no sign of our forlorn-hope swimmer. As nearly as we could judge from the noises on board the yacht, the mutineers were trying to repair the disabled capstan. Apparently it didn't suit them to be tied by the leg and unable to run away.
"Let me have that old rifle, Billy," said Van Dyck; this after the capstan noises had been located. Lying flat, Bonteck aimed as well as he could in the uncertain light, and we distinctly heard the clang of the bullet as it penetrated the metal bulwarks of the yacht's stem. The single shot did the business, and we heard no more hammerings at the crippled machinery.
Beyond this, we waited again while the minutes dragged on, leaden-winged, slowly but surely extinguishing the hope that Dupuyster had escaped. But, after hope was quite dead in the four hearts of us, and a hot thirst for vengeance was beginning to take its place, we saw Jerry in our own edge of the lagoon, swimming slowly and rolling from side to side with his stroke, like a man utterly spent.
I think all four of us dashed wildly into the shallows to drag him out and rush him to cover in the jungle edge. He was gasping for breath, and even in the poor light we could see a long red splash on one thigh; a cut from which the blood was still oozing. Van Dyck stripped his own shirt to bandage the wound, and the reincarnated one protested manfully.
"Bally lot of trouble you're takin' over a scratch," he gurgled. "Bleedin' will stop of its own accord when it gets ready. But if any gentleman should—er—happen to have a drop of cognac about him——"