Dick in the water was a fish. To get close to the boat, and, treading water or even floating, loose the arrow at short range, was his object. He was no longer a man nor a human being, but implacable enmity, reasonless energy directed by hate.
Rantan and Carlin had fired before they saw what was coming, a head, an arm half submerged and a bow skittering along the water. Carlin’s jaws snapped together, he tried to extract the cartridge case from his gun, fumbled and failed.
Rantan, less rattled and quicker with his fingers, extracted and reloaded, aimed and fired and missed.
“Fire, you damned fool,” he said to the other, but the game was lost—Carlin was at the anchor rope, the memory of the four dead men on the beach slain by the poisoned arrows of Karolin had him in its grip as it had the other, who with one last glance at the coming terror dropped his gun and seized an oar.
They were beaten, put to flight—if only for the moment.
CHAPTER III—THE RETURN TO THE KERMADEC
As they rowed making for the schooner with the light of the westering sun in their eyes, they could see the head of the swimmer as he made back for the shore, and away on the beach near the trees they could see the great gulls congregated around the forms of the four dead men, a boiling of wings above the reef line and against the evening blue of the sky.
Predatory gulls when feeding on a carcase do not sit and gorge, they are always in motion more or less, especially when they are in great numbers as now. Far at sea and maybe from a hundred miles away guests were still arriving for the banquet spread by death—late comers whose voices went before them sharp on the evening wind, or came up against it weak, remote and filled with suggestions of hunger and melancholy.
“God’s truth,” said the beachcomber, spitting as he rowed.
They were coming on towards the ship and it was the first word spoken.