"THE BLINDING LIGHT SWEPT OVER THEM."
"Why, Mike," cries I, "and how did you get here?"
"Please, your honour, I just dropped in," says he.
"Then, if I had a rope's end, I'd make you drop out again!" says I.
"Aye, but, your honour," says he, "when was the Irishman born that had any liking for the water? Sure, I always loved ye from the first day I clapped these blessed eyes upon ye! 'I'll go aboard to take care of him,' says I, 'for I feel like his own mother's son!'"
There was no time to argue with him. What with getting the launch away neatly, and being mortal afraid to find myself any minute in the path of the cruiser's search-light, I had too much to do to begin with a hullabaloo—and for that matter the situation was not one to set a man against companionship. There we were, the five of us, in a boat not built for ocean seas, running like a good one away from the ship that should have carried us to Europe and our homes. Let the search-light be clapped upon us, and the gold would be aboard the British cruiser within an hour. Or, in another case and a harder one, let the wind blow, and what then? The gold weighed us down as it was, until even gentle seas splashed us as we lifted to them. A hatful of wind would sink us; a shoreman would have known that. I believed that it was the spin of a coin anyway; and just as I was saying it the cruiser showed her light again, and a great white arc fixed itself upon the distant steamer like a mighty river of molten radiance flowing out upon a darkened sea.
"Look at that for a lantern now," says Mike the Irishman, cowering before it. "'Twould see ye home from a waking, and no mistake about it. Just douk your head, sir, if you please. 'Twould be as well not to be on speaking terms with them when next ye meet."
I smiled at his notion that any amount of "douking" would save us from the cruiser's light, but instinctively I crouched down with the others. To me it seemed impossible that any freak of fortune could hide us from the cruiser's observation. There we were in the still sea, a black speck, no doubt, but one that a clever eye on a warship's bridge would never fail to spy out. Our own steamer, the Oceanus, was running north as fast as honest engines could drive her. She, too, appeared now to be just a shimmer of dancing lights—the captain showed every lantern he had got to divert the chase from the launch, and here he succeeded only too well.
Though it was all Lombard Street to a china orange that the cruiser marked us, she held on obstinately after the bigger game. Perhaps she believed that it was all a sham and that we had put off to make a fool of her. I never learned; but I could scarcely believe my eyes when the blinding light swept over them and still nothing happened. Were they all daft aboard her? It was really incredible.