"What are you going to do?" asked Austin.
Jefferson laughed unpleasantly. "Head the devils off from the island, any way, and, if it's necessary, obliterate some of Funnel-paint's friends. It's fortunate the launch has twice the speed of any canoe."
He clambered on board the launch, and when a few more men came scrambling down, swung her out before they could decide whether it would be wiser to climb back again. After that, he left the helm to Austin, and moving towards the engine, opened the valve wide.
"Head her for the islet. If they have had anybody watching us in a canoe, they'll go there first," he said.
Austin made a sign of comprehension, but said nothing until his comrade, sitting down, opened the case he had asked for. Then he became possessed by unpleasant apprehensions as he saw Jefferson take out several rolls of giant-powder with fuses attached to them. They looked exactly like candles now, only the wicks were black, and unusually long. Sitting still, very grim in face, he tied one or two together, and then nipped a piece or two off the fuses with his knife.
"I guess it would be as well to make sure," he said.
"Of what?" asked Austin.
"That they'll go off when I want them," and Jefferson laughed a little grating laugh. "I've had them ready for some while, and took a good deal of trouble timing the fuses. Now, the effect of giant-powder's usually local, and I figure one could throw these things far enough for us to keep outside the striking radius. They'd go better with a little compression, but there's a big detonator inside them which should stir them up without it. If these two sticks fell upon a nigger they wouldn't blow him up. They'd dissolve him right into gases, and it's quite probable there wouldn't be any trace of him left."
Austin asked no more questions. Worn as he was by tense effort and the climate, kept awake as he had been to watch when he might have slept at night, and troubled by vague apprehensions that the loathsome plague might be working in his blood, he was ready, and, perhaps, rather more than that, to turn upon the man who had made their heavy burden more oppressive still. Indeed, it would have been a relief to him to feel the jump of a rifle barrel in his hand, but from Jefferson's scheme he shrank almost aghast. To run amuck, with flashing pistol or smashing firebar, among the canoes, would have appeared to him a natural thing, but the calculating quietness of his comrade, who sat so unconcernedly, making sure that the rolls of plastic material should not fail, struck him as wholly abnormal, and a trifle horrible. Pistol shot, machete slash, and spear thrust, were things that one might face; but it seemed beyond toleration that another man should unloose the tremendous potentialities pent up in those yellow rolls upon flesh and blood.
He was, however, quite aware that there was nothing to be gained by protesting, and while Jefferson went on with his grim preparations he turned his gaze upriver towards the approaching canoes. He could see them clearly, black bars that slid with glinting paddles athwart a track of silvery radiance, for the half-moon had sailed out from behind the cloud. They were coming on in a phalanx, five or six of them, and the splash and thud of the paddles rose in a rhythmic din. He swung the launch's bows a trifle down stream, to run in between them and the island.