Morrison’s feet trampled on the deck. He plunged into the cabin, and bent over the gangster.
“What have you done with the emeralds?” he demanded fiercely.
Louie looked up at him with a twisted smile.
“Hell!” he muttered, and his eyes closed, twitching.
The cabin was filling with smoke from, the burning matting. Lang sprang to close the gas tank. He glanced down and saw no gleam of reflecting liquid.
“Why, it’s empty,” he said, in surprise, and probed it with his arm.
“But not altogether,” he added, withdrawing his arm. He brought up a roughly wrapped little sack of red-striped silk, that burst open as he threw it down, letting out a stream of twinkling green stones on the crimson-spotted floor.
CHAPTER XXII
TRONADOR LIGHT
“Wild life is plainly what I was made for,” said Lang. “See how I’ve thrived on it. A great adventurer’ll be lost in me when I go back to surgery in Boston. I’ve had maltreatment enough to kill a mule, as I’d have thought once, and it’s brought me to life. What a broken-down wretch I was in Mobile! What a whining, ill-tempered dog you must have thought me!”
“I never did,” Eva denied quickly. She had just relieved Lang at the helm of the Chita, sitting beside him in the little glassed pilot house forward. They had hoped to make Puerto Montt that evening and had kept on, though it was now two hours after sunset. Blackness was over the mountains to the east and the rough islands on the other side of the wide channel, and the sea heaved gently, smooth and black, bubbling up palely away from the bow.