“This little beginning may be part of a terrible affair,” she told herself. She recalled the stories she had read of those remote days when Napoleon tried with 20,000 picked soldiers to subdue these people and had failed.
“There are seven hundred Marines on the island,” she told herself. “But what are they against so many? This—this terrible schooner will be everywhere, in all the little bays, lurking about with rifles and ammunition to sell for gain and at the cost of many human lives.”
Suddenly a desperate measure suggested itself to her. She recalled the incident of a few nights before when, by shooting an arrow made into a pitch-pine torch, Curlie had burned a cord and loosed the black goat.
Curlie’s bow and arrows were at this moment close by his side. Near at hand was a dwarf pine. It would furnish the pitch. In the center of that boat lying down there in the bay stacked round the mast was a pile of sleeping mats. Inch thick affairs of palm fiber they were and dry as tinder.
The schooner lay almost directly beneath them, an easy shot.
“One flaming arrow in that pile of sleeping mats and the boat will be in flames.” She said these words aloud without really willing it.
“And the ship carries much powder,” said Mona gripping Dot’s arm until it hurt. “It is the way. He, the young man, must shoot the arrow. He must shoot at once. See! I will gather the rosin.”
She endeavored to spring to her feet but Dot pulled her back.
“I—I—Wait. Wait one moment,” Dot implored. “Those are bad men. Perhaps they do not deserve to live, but—”
“They do not deserve it.” The native woman’s tone was bitter. “That white man who owns that ship sold the rifle that killed my father in a needless revolution before the Americans came. He does not deserve to live.”