“Shoot the arrow.” Her lips were close to his ear, her tone low and tense.
“Here is the rosin.” The black woman’s hand trembled as she pressed a sticky ball into his own.
Seizing an arrow he rolled it over and over in the sticky mass. Then, with a sudden intake of breath he lighted a match. A moment later he nocked his arrow to send it circling straight and true, down, down, down to at last bury itself in the pile of dry mats.
All unseen by the workers on the schooner, a wisp of white smoke began mounting to the sky. Then, with a suddenness that was startling, the whole mass of mats burst out in red flame. Even then they did not see. For a space of thirty seconds they worked on. When at last the smell of smoke reached their nostrils and they turned to find themselves staring into the flames, they acted according to their own natures.
A native seized a bucket of drinking water to dash it into the flames. It might have been oil for all the good it did. The mats, baked as they had been in the dry Haitian sunlight, were tinder. So too was the deck, the mast and the rails of the schooner.
The schooner carried two dories. The one at her side was more than half filled with heavy boxes of rifles. Two natives, in an attempt to lighten this dory, over-balanced it. It filled and sank. All thought now was of escape. Men poured from the cabin where they had been sleeping. Brown men, red men, black men, men of every hue, they stormed madly about the deck.
Two men, cooler than the rest, began launching the remaining dory.
One man, wilder than the rest and possessing no patience at all, leaped into the sea.
“The White Shadow!” Mona screamed. “That man will perish!”
As if hearing her call, the man turned his face upward as he swam.