"Look ahead!" he exclaimed, leveling his arm at a shadow that darted out of the darkness and passed between them and the launch. The Governor saw it and stifled a cry of dismay.
"Two women in a canoe! They're going to run for it!"
"They are fools!" growled Leary settling himself to the oars and swinging the boat round.
The Governor had already turned the canoe and was furiously plying his paddle. A lantern shot its beams from the phantom craft, but the light vanished immediately.
"There goes his engine," the Governor called as he took the lead. "He spotted that light and will try to run them down."
Isabel and Ruth, attempting to elude Carey's blockade and seek help at Huddleston, were forcing a crisis that might at any minute result in disaster. It was close upon midnight, and there was no help to be had from either shore. A fierce anger surged through Archie's heart. There could have been no safer place to commit murder than the quiet bay at the dead of night. Ultimately the bodies would be washed up; there would be the usual inquiries and a report of accidental drowning.
It was incredible that Carey would attempt to run down two women on the dark bay and it was apparently his intention to circle round them and drive them back to the camp. Neither the canoe of the adventurous women nor the launch was visible from the row boat, though the engine's rapid pulsations indicated the line of Carey's pursuit. To shout to the daring women that help was at hand would only alarm them, and Archie crouched in the bow, peering ahead for the silhouette of the Governor as his canoe rose on the waves.
The launch executed a wide half-circle, stopped and retraced its course. Leary, refusing to relinquish the oars, swore between strokes, the object of his maledictions being the invisible Carey, whom he consigned to the bottom of the lake in phrases that struck Archie as singularly felicitous. In spite of their steady advance and the frequent turns and twists of the launch, the canoe and row boat seemed to approach no nearer to the enemy. There was no doubt but that Carey knew a craft of some kind had put off from the camp and he was determined to intercept it; but he was still unconscious of the presence in the bay of the three men from Huddleston.
The Governor called to Archie to stop following and move in the direction of the town, independently of his own movements, thus broadening the surface they were covering with a view to succoring the canoe. As though with malevolent delight in the fear he was causing, Carey rapidly changed the course of the launch, urging it backward and forward with a resulting wild agitation of the waters. In one of these evolutions it passed within oar's length of the row boat.
"Keep on swearing!" cried Archie. "He's not a man; he's the devil!"