“We’ve headed him off,” he said. “Go on board, Eva, and tell your father what’s happened. Tell him to let no one aboard. I suppose he’s armed. I’ve got to get our treasure back.”
She hesitated dumbly. He gathered her into his arms with a passionate impulse, holding her close, kissing her wet face, her lips. She clung to him, her eyes shut, responding to his kisses, until he let her go, looking dazed and dreamy.
“Go aboard quickly, dearest,” he said.
“You’re going to risk your life—you mustn’t!” she murmured.
“Trust me. Don’t worry. Just go aboard,” he answered, and wheeled, casting another look at the senseless, or dead Louie.
He ran back up the slope, his rifle cocked, looking about him keenly. In his excitement he had no sense of danger. The thought that the emeralds should be lost at this stage was maddening to him, after all the horrors he had gone through to get them. But he knew that Carroll could not have gone far; he could make no final escape on that desolate coast; he would assuredly be rounded up.
He came to the place where Carroll had disappeared. Searching the ground closely, he found spots of blood. Carroll had really been hit, then; but it could not have been severely, for he had gone on, and the blood-drops ended after the first few yards.
A scout might have trailed him, but it was vain for Lang to try. He prowled forward in the direction Carroll had been taking, rifle ready to shoot, realizing now that he was very liable to be shot down suddenly himself. He thought once that a shadow rose and flitted before him. He shouted, and then fired after it; but on going forward he found neither traces nor tracks.
He prowled ahead again, sweeping a wide circle, groping past shrubs and tree clumps that looked like men in the fog. He had gone a couple of hundred yards when a flash and report spat from a thicket ten feet ahead, with a ringing sound in the air by his ears. His nervous start fired the rifle from the hip. Instantly he dropped flat, and fired again at the point where he had seen the flash.
Nothing replied. The fog rolled over and over in clearing waves. After lying strained to high tension for fifteen minutes, Lang crawled cautiously forward. He found footprints in the soft ground this time, but Carroll had slipped away.