At that moment he was considerably taken aback by seeing a light flash across the sky. His first thought was that the pirates had discovered him, but upon second consideration he rightly concluded that the flash came from a searchlight in the offing.
Before he had gone very far a faint light blinked from a point half-way up the cliff and immediately above (so he judged) the entrance to the tunnel. It was promptly answered by a light from the Malfilio and in a few minutes the crew of the pirate cruiser were standing to their guns. From where Minalto stood he could see all the starboard guns trained upon the entrance to the harbour, and rather apprehensively he wondered what would happen to him if they opened fire when he was swimming through that narrow gap.
He remained for some minutes crouching against the cliff, until it occurred to him that time and tide wait for no man, and that if he were to return by the way he came he would have to hurry his movements.
Minalto took the water as noiselessly as an otter. Swimming dog-stroke in order to minimize the phosphorescent swirl of his wake, he kept close to the cliffs—so close, in fact, that once his right knee came into sharp contact with a rock.
Then came the crucial point of his return journey—the passage of the harbour mouth. Dozens of pairs of eyes must, he knew, be peering in that direction, but he reckoned on the possibility that while they were looking for a large object, namely an armed boat from the warship off the island, they would fail to detect a small one—the head of the swimmer.
Unobserved he cleared the projecting headland, and working from buoy to buoy along the south approach channel until he came in view of the reef, gained a "kicking-off" position for the longest and most strenuous of his many swims that night.
Although the sea was warm he was beginning to feel that "water-logged" sensation that results from keeping in too long. Alternately swimming on his breast and back he continued doggedly, knowing that if he rested he would be swept out of his course by the steady indraught into the lagoon, for by this time the young flood was making.
At length he gained the reef, rubbed his cramped limbs, and set off briskly to the point nearest that part of the island whence he had set out, and an hour and a half later he was being hauled up the cliff.
Jasper Minalto had told his story, without any embellishments, in the broad, burring dialect of the West Country. But behind that simple narrative his listeners detected a ring of indomitability that had brought the man safely through the grave perils by land and sea.
"That coral is most heavy on shoe leather," he remarked. "Fair cut to pieces 'un is. But nex' time 'twill be only one way, like; seein' as how us be a-comin' back wi' the boat."