When the outboard motor rushed toward La Rubia, Capitán Saavedra zestfully gave his engines full throttle. When the racketing, roaring motorboat arrived beside his ship, and Terry shouted to him to stop, he chuckled and drove on. In fact, he left La Rubia's pilot-house to wave cheerfully at the two men. They frantically ran close and shouted to him above the rat-tat-tatting of their own motor and the rumble of his Diesels.
La Rubia reached the lagoon entrance with the smaller boat close at her side, and Terry still shouting.
But Capitán Saavedra did not believe. Maybe he did not understand. Certainly he did not obey. Ocean swells lifted and tossed the motorboat. It became necessary to slow down, for safety. But La Rubia went grandly on, into the open sea.
"We can't force him to stop," said Davis in a despairing voice. "He won't. I only hope we're wrong, and he gets through!"
The outboard stayed where it was, and swells tossed it haphazardly. La Rubia switched on her navigation lights. She drove zestfully to the southward. She sailed on, dwindling in size, as the drone of her Diesels diminished in volume.
Looking back, Terry saw the Esperance approaching from the lagoon, dark figures on her deck. Terry shouted, cries answered him, and the Esperance came to a stop as the motorboat drew alongside.
Terry and Davis scrambled to her deck while one of the crew-cuts led the smaller boat astern and tethered it.
"We're safe enough here," Terry said bitterly, "and since you've come, we can stay and watch if anything happens. If only she keeps on going...."
But La Rubia did not. Her lights showed that she had changed course. She changed course again. Her masthead light began to waver from side to side. She wallowed in such a way that it was clear she was neither on course nor in motion any longer.
Nobody gave orders, but the Esperance's engine roared. The action from this point on became an automatic and quick response to an emergency.