A yell went up from the felucca as the crew saw themselves saved—a yell of defiance.
Again the gray jet of smoke spurted from the gray port, and this time the background of purple dusk showed the red tongue of the flame. The sound of the report reached them, but not so swiftly as another sound—a nerve-rending menace which shrieked in their very ears, as it seemed, and passed, to thunder crashingly against the forehead of the crag. And again Muhammed laughed and showed his white teeth, and roared to his fellows to swing the yard-arm about as he spun the boat between two waiting jaws of rock and sent her bounding out into the open before the lash of the favoring breeze. And night fell over them—for Claire Van Arlen the hopeless night of despair.
She looked up to find Miller standing beside her, looking down at Aylmer's face with sombre, inquiring eyes. And she realized for the first time that in that face the eyes were closed again, the lips bloodless, the cheeks sunken. She gave an exclamation; she bent and stanched the blood which still flowed from the wounded temple.
Miller picked up a bucket, seized a rope, attached it to the handle, and slung it overboard. He placed it, brimmed with water, at her feet. She looked up again, eyed him silently and without thanks, dipped her handkerchief in the water and laved Aylmer's face. And Miller himself remained silent, as if he would force the first comment from her, as if he probed for information by mere inertness. Had he been heard? She guessed that he was asking himself—and by force of silence, her—this question.
A sudden instinct not to betray herself gripped her. Aylmer? Was not he an example of a like reticence? He had not revealed the fact that his hands were free till circumstances had revealed it, with a vengeance. She would follow this example and so tell nothing. She pillowed Aylmer's head gently upon a coil of rope and stood up.
"The hope of rescue is gone then?" she said quietly. "There is no chance of their rounding the island, and encountering us later?"
He shrugged his shoulders doubtfully.
"They seldom carry search-lights—craft of that size, in the Spanish navy, at any rate. No, Muhammed's seamanship has taken the trick this time. Spanish captains do not waste coal lavishly, and what, after all, have they to go on. Merely the words 'Help! Prisoners!' It might easily have been the vagary of some half-drunken sponge-fisher."
She looked at him keenly.
"That was what he signalled?" she said. "You understood that?"