"I've got a flash-lamp in my cabin. That'll show us the compass card at least. Stand by while I run down and get it."
The man mumbled an "Aye, aye, sir." Retreating footsteps were just audible.
Neither speaker had been visible to Lanyard. By putting out a hand he could have touched the helmsman, but his body made not even the shadow of a silhouette against the sky. The fog was rendering the night the simple and unqualified negation of light.
And in that time of Stygian gloom violence was done swiftly, surely, and without mercy; with pity, yes, and with regret. Lanyard was sorry for the man at the wheel. But what was to be done could not be done in any other way.
The surprise aided him, for the fellow offered barely a show of opposition. His astounded faculties had no more than recognised the call for resistance when he was powerless in Lanyard's hands. Swung bodily away from the wheel, he went over the rail to the forward deck like a bag of sugar. Immediately Lanyard turned to the binnacle.
Sensitive fingers located the key-hole in the pedestal, the one key saved from the ring which Mr. Swain had so unfortunately and unaccountably lost opened the door--the key, of course, that Mr. Swain had used under Lanyard's eyes when demonstrating the functions of the binnacle to Liane Delorme.
Thrusting a hand into the opening, Lanyard groped for the adjustable magnets in their racks, and one by one removed and dropped them to the grating at the foot of the binnacle.
He worked with hands amazingly nimble and sure, and was closing and relocking the door when Mr. Collison tumbled up the ladder with his flash-light. So when the second mate arrived upon the bridge, Lanyard was waiting for him; and in consequence of a second act of deplorable violence, Mr. Collison returned to the deck backwards and lay quite still while Lanyard returned to the wheel.
Collecting the abstracted magnets he carried them to the rail, cast them into the sea and threw in the key to the little door to keep them company. Then, back at the binnacle, he unscrewed the brass caps of the cylindrical brass tube which housed the Flinders bar, removed that also, replaced the caps, and consigned the bar to the sea in its turn.
By choice he would have made a good job of it and abolished the quadrantal correctors as well; but he judged he had done mischief enough to secure his ends, as it was. The compass ought now to be just as constant to the magnetic pole as a humming-bird to one especial rose.