"No arms," cries the captain, presently; "and most of them half drunk. We're going through this, Mister Begg, right through, I assure you!"
Well, I began to believe it; nevertheless, there were men on the shore before us, halloaing madmen, with clasp-knives in their hands and murder in their faces. Clear in the moonlight you could see them; the still air sent up their horrid imprecations. Those men we must pass, I said, if we would reach the boat. And we passed them. It seems a miracle even when I write of it.
Now, we had halted at the foot of the ravine and were just prepared to go headlong for the six, believing, it may be, that one at least of us must fall, when they fired a shot, not from the gun at the watch-tower gate, but from Czerny's own yacht away in the offing; and coming plump down upon the sand, not a cable's length from our own boat, a shell burst with a thunderous explosion, and scattering in fragments of steel, it scared the mutineers as no rifle could have done. Roaring out like stricken bulls, cursing their master in all tongues, they began to storm the cliff-side nimbly and to run for the shelter of the woods; but some fell and rolled backward to the sand, some turned on their own knives and lay dead at the gully's foot; while those who gained the summit stood all together, and wailing their doleful song they yelled defiance at Czerny's ship.
But we—we made the boat; and falling half-dead in it, we thrust it from the beach and heard our comrades' voices again.
CHAPTER XXIII
THE END OF THE SIXTY HOURS
The same night. Off Ken's Island. Half-past twelve o'clock.
We have not returned to the watch-tower rock, nor can we bring ourselves to that while there is any hope left to us of helping those whom Czerny marooned on the dangerous shore. Our gig drifts lazily in a pool of the whitest moonlight. We can still make out the ship's boats lying about Czerny's yacht, and the angry crews which man them. From the beach itself rises up the mutineers' wail of agony, like a wild beast's cry, at one time loud and ferocious, then dying away in a long-drawn cry, which haunts the ear. Ever and anon, as the mood takes them, the gunners on Czerny's yacht let fly at us with their erring shells; but they smite the air or hurt the water, or drop the bounding fire on the shimmering spread of sand beyond us. Perhaps it is that this employment occupies the minds of the longboats' crews and keeps them from reckoning with the master who has befooled them. They, at least, are at the crisis of their peril. Afloat there on a gentle swell they must know that any hour may bring a changing wind and a breaking sea, and a shore rockbound and unattainable. They are playing with chance, and chance will turn upon them presently. Let them make for the island where the laughing woods say "Come!" and the heralds of sleep will touch them upon the foreheads, and raving, dreaming, they will fall at last, just victims of the island visions. Say that their brute intelligences do not yet understand this; but hunger and thirst will teach them ere the dawn, and then reckoning must come!
All this I foresaw as we let the boat drift by the sandy bays, and spake, one to another, of to-morrow and that which it must bring. Whatever our own misfortune might be, that of Czerny's men was worse a hundredfold. For the moment it amused them to see the shells plunging and hissing in the sea about us; for the moment the desire to be quit of us made them forget how it stood with them and what must come after. But the reckoning would be sure. Let a capful of wind come scudding across that glassy sea, and all the riches in the world would not buy Edmond Czerny's life of these sea-wolves who sought it.