He seemed to have eyes in the back of his head, he turned so suddenly when Elsie neared him.
“Ah, thank God you are safe!” he said, drawing her to him for an instant. “Stand there, dear heart!”
He placed her in the forward angle of the bridge rail, and leaned out over the side. She understood that she must not speak to him then, but a great joy overwhelmed her, and her eyes melted into tears.
Christobal, who had missed no word of Elsie’s frenzied protest in the saloon, nor failed to note the manner of Courtenay’s greeting, seemed to take the collapse of his own aspirations with the unmoved stoicism he had displayed in the face of danger.
“The ship’s boats—” he began, but the captain raised his gun and fired twice aft along the side of the vessel. Cries of pain and a good deal of splashing in the sea proved that he had expedited the departure of several Indians who were perched on the rails beyond the reach of Walker’s steam jet.
“The ship’s boats,” went on Christobal calmly, “have turned up in some mysterious manner, just in the nick of time. A few minutes more, and they would have been too late.”
“But where have they come from? Where can they have been all these days?” whispered Elsie, whose eyes were so dimmed that she perforce abandoned the effort to make out what was going on in the sea near the ship.
“My brain reels under the wildest guesses. At present we are chiefly concerned in the fact that they are here. Yet people say that the age of miracles has passed: obviously a foolish remark.”
Those who have been plucked from the precipice by a sleeve, as it were, are seldom able to concentrate their attention on the one thought which should apparently swamp all others. They either yield to the strain, and lapse into unconsciousness, or their minds become the arena of minor emotions, wherein trivialities play battledore and shuttlecock with the tremendous issues of the moment. When a more extended knowledge of all that had happened, joined to a nicer adjustment of the time-factor in events, enabled Elsie to realise the extraordinary deliverance from death which she had been vouchsafed that night, she began to appreciate the service which Christobal rendered her in discussing matters with such nonchalance.
Barely a minute had elapsed since they were in the throes of a struggle which promised to be the last act of a tragedy. The ship was then over-run by a horde of howling savages, maddened by the desperate resistance offered by the defenders, and ruthless as wolves in their lust for destruction. Now, the Kansas was clear of every bedaubed Alaculof, save the many who cumbered the decks, either dead or so seriously wounded that they could not move. These men were so near akin to animals, that this condition implied ultimate collapse save in a few instances of fractured skulls and broken limbs. From the final stage of a hopeless butchery the survivors of the ship’s company were suddenly transferred to a position of reasonable security. It was not that the arrival of the ship’s boats meant such an accession of fighting strength that the Alaculofs could not have made sure of victory. Gray and his companions were badly armed. The Indians remaining in the canoes could have pelted them to shreds in a few minutes. Even those on the ship had the power to resist any attempt by the newcomers to gain the decks. But the superstitious savages had already screwed themselves up to an act of unusual daring in delivering a night attack, and the appearance of boats filled with men of whose fighting qualities they had already such a lively experience quite demoralized them. They fled without attempting a counter assault. Just as negroes conjure up white demons, so did these nude Alaculofs regard with awe men who wore clothes. They were ready to kill and eat the strange beings of another race who, few in numbers and ill armed, wandered into their rock-pent fastness, but it was quite a different thing to face them in equal combat.