Miguel had worked himself up to a state of great excitement, and when he finished, his bare feet went pattering off across the deck almost before Grahame could give the order.
Tired as the men were, they realized the necessity for haste, and they lost no time in getting under way. There was a clatter in the stokehold as the fires were cleaned, the dinghy crept across the creek, and half-seen men forward hurriedly coiled in a wet rope. Then the boat came back and the windlass rattled while the propeller floundered slowly round. The anchor rose to the bows and the Enchantress moved away against the flood tide.
The pilot took the wheel while Grahame stood beside him. There were broad, light patches where the water dazzled Grahame's eyes, and then belts of gloom in which the mangroves faded to a formless blur. Still, they did not touch bottom; miry points round which the tide swirled, rotting logs on mud-banks, and misty trees crept astern, and at last they heard the rumble of the swell on beaten sand.
She glided on, lifting now and then with a louder gurgle about her planks. When a white beach gleamed in the moonlight where the trees broke off, the Enchantress stopped to land the faithful pilot, who had first betrayed and then saved them.
"It was a risky thing he did," Grahame said, as the half-breed, standing easily in his boat, swaying with the rhythm of his oars, rowed off into the moonlight. "Suppose they had caught him coming to us—or with us!"
"I'm thinking yon pilot's a bit of a hero," Macallister responded laconically. "Albeit a coward first!"
"Oh, it was all for Don Martin's sake that he risked his own hide to warn us. Don Martin has a wonderful hold on those peons. They'd go through fire and water for him."
The Enchantress skirted a point where two sentinel cedar-trees stood out blackly against the sky; then the spray leaped about the bows as she dipped to the swell, and the throb of engines quickened as she left the shore behind.
Two weeks later the Enchantress was steaming across a sea that was flecked with purple shadow and lighted by incandescent foam. Macallister lounged in the engine-room doorway, Grahame sat smoking on a coil of rope, and Walthew, wrapped in a dirty blanket, lay under the awning. His face was hollow, his hair damp and lank, and his hands, with which he was clumsily rolling a cigarette, were very thin. The deck was piled with a load of dyewood, which they had bought rather with the object of accounting for their cruise than for the profit that might be made on it.