“Lie here and rest,” he said to Grief. “It will be a long swim to-night. As for this cook-man, I will take him now to the higher places where my brothers live with the goats.”
IV
“It is well that you swim as a man should, Big Brother,” Mauriri whispered.
From the lava glen they had descended to the head of the bay and taken to the water. They swam softly, without splash, Mauriri in the lead. The black walls of the crater rose about them till it seemed they swam on the bottom of a great bowl. Above was the sky of faintly luminous star-dust. Ahead they could see the light which marked the Rattler, and from her deck, softened by distance, came a gospel hymn played on the phonograph intended for Pilsach.
The two swimmers bore to the left, away from the captured schooner. Laughter and song followed on board after the hymn, then the phonograph started again. Grief grinned to himself at the appositeness of it as “Lead, Kindly Light,” floated out over the dark water.
“We must take the passage and land on the Big Rock,” Mauriri whispered. “The devils are holding the low land. Listen!”
Half a dozen rifle shots, at irregular intervals, attested that Brown still held the Rock and that the pirates had invested the narrow peninsula.
At the end of another hour they swam under the frowning loom of the Big Rock. Mauriri, feeling his way, led the landing in a crevice, up which for a hundred feet they climbed to a narrow ledge.
“Stay here,” said Mauriri. “I go to Brown. In the morning I shall return.”