Presently he regained the automobile. It was a new model, built for an impression of lowness and width; it sat and bared its teeth between blind headlights like some garish dinosaur defying the glaciers. Judas! Suppose this was only a harmless passer-by? But a signboard told him POINT PERRO, and who else would have come today? Kintyre tried the door. It wasn't locked. He eased it open to read the registration on the steering column.
Gerald R. Clayton. So. Kintyre felt his hands shaking. One more reassurance, before he went down the path. The dashboard thermometer showed the engine still warm. They hadn't been here long.
I do not wish for a God to help me, he thought. But I wish I had one to thank.
He filled his lungs and emptied them, filled and emptied them. Those were dank breaths, but they helped him ease up. He had three armed men to face; if he must also war with himself, it would be hopeless. Not that he felt any great conviction of winning. But—yes. He reached under the dash and yanked loose the ignition wires. After he was dead, that might delay their escape with Corinna.
He climbed the low barbed-wire fence. It guarded a jut of cliff maned with harsh yellow grass. You had to go to its very edge to see that there was a beach underneath. As he approached, he began to hear the surf. Incoming tide: breakers crashed among rocks, the water streamed down again with a roar, whirlpools gurgled in small grottoes. He did not think a human cry would be heard this far above.
When he came to the brink, he could just make out a sketch of jumbled crags and a laciness on the bull combers; then the rifted mist hid the sea from him again. There would be a highness to either side, the arms enclosing this inlet, but those were lost in the gray. He walked cautiously until he saw the path, a goat track plunging downward.
Its dirt was gritty under his feet. Despite himself, he loosed gravel showers now and again. After each he stopped, crouching and listening for voices. There were none: only the surf, snorting more loudly every time. The fog was his friend, could he have approached without it? Yes, he'd have found a way somehow, swum around a headland if he must, but the fog helped him. No proof of supernatural assistance, of course; this was a notoriously wet stretch of coast; however, he was advantaged thereby.
At the cliff's foot he stood among half-seen boulders and considered where his enemy might be. Not more than a hundred yards from him, but he had perhaps fifty feet of unclear vision. This pea soup was thickening by the minute. If the others arrived, say, twenty minutes ago, they would have been granted better visibility, could have selected a spot. Kintyre stretched his memory. The cliffs made a semicircular wall, with driftwood and great stones at its foot; the diameter was a narrow strip of sand, paralleled by a line of rocks. These latter were below high-water mark and would be drenched already. Kintyre could just glimpse the sleet-colored ocean breasting them. Okay. So his quarry was under the cliff. Was there some way to lure one of them out?
An idea came. It was hazardous, but no more so than blundering blind. And he was not afraid of what might happen to him. In a certain way, he had been given another chance to rescue Morna; he could not but take it.
Crouching in the rocks, he started to cough, as much like a sea lion's bark as he could manage. It was a bad imitation, but he dealt with pavement people. The noise went deep, wet, and ringing among the breakers.