I squeezed her hands in both mine, turned and left her.
Holgate was some hundred yards in front of me, plunging heavily through the bushes. He called to mind some evil and monstrous beast of the forest that broke clumsily in wrath upon its enemy.
Down on the beach I could see that Pierce and some of the others, who had already arrived, were casting the boat from her moorings. I laboured after Holgate, and came out on the beach near him. He ran down to the water's edge and called aloud:
"Put back. Put back, damn you."
The boat was some fifty yards from land by now, and was awash in a broken current. Three men bent to the oars.
Holgate levelled his revolver and fired.
One of the men lay down grotesquely on his oar. He fired again, and one of the remaining two stood up, shook a fist towards the shore and, staggering backwards, capsized the boat in the surf. He must have sunk like lead with his wound, for he never rose to the surface; but the last man, who was Pierce, battled gallantly with the flood, and endeavoured to reach the boat, which was bottom upwards. In this, however, he failed, for the tide seemed to suck him away. The boat drifted outwards, and after a few ineffectual struggles, finding probably that his strength was failing him, Pierce struck out towards the shore. He landed a hundred yards or more away from Holgate. Between the two men were gathered in a bunch, irresolute and divided in counsels, the remaining mutineers.
For the moment I think I was so taken up with the situation that I did not consider my own case. No one had eyes for me in the fast-descending dusk, and behind the shelter of a bush I watched the course of that singular drama. Holgate had indifferently reloaded his revolver, and now stood holding it carelessly by his side.
"Gray, is that you? Come here," he called. But the knot of men did not move; and now Pierce was walking rapidly towards it. It opened to receive him, and swallowed him up again cautiously, as if there was safety in that circle against the arch-mutineer. Holgate strode leisurely towards them.
"I suppose you guess where we are?" he said, in his malevolent, fluent, wheezing tones. "You've dished us, Pierce, my man."