Despair enters the breasts of strong men only to refuel their fires of determination. So it was with Paul Lavelle. Emily saw the gloom pass from his face. A conquering light of resolution succeeded it. His jaw set again in its familiar line of purpose. Thus she had beheld him on the deck of the doomed Cambodia. Thus he had looked as he had come to her that night.
"We must put to sea again," said he, facing her quickly and in his tenseness pressing the hand with which she was clinging to him. He read her apprehension. "Morning may see this bit of earth mixed with the ocean. It is but a piece of waif land—a thing without an anchorage—something torn from its mother mass by the ocean in anger. For us it is a trap—one of the sea's countless treacheries." He glanced over his shoulder at the surf. "There is no time to lose," he added.
Emily met this revelation of new peril so calmly that Lavelle paused in wonderment as he swung away from her.
"Can't I—do something to—help you?" she asked. She might have been craving a boon.
"Just hold to your faith. We'll win through if you keep that, won——"
The wind snapped his words off there. She did not know that he had hailed her as "wonder woman." Yet she glowed at the glance of frank admiration which had accompanied his words.
Lavelle called Chang. The giant started up from his haunches a few feet away, where he had been crouching and listening with eager ear to every word which had fallen from his master's lips.
"Him clay-zee islan', master! No good!" avowed Chang.
"To sea!" was Lavelle's answer. He drove his purpose into the serang with those two words and a gesture. The giant hesitated so long as it took to look from Lavelle to the surf and back again. There was doubt in his eyes.
"Jump! Night soon!" cried Lavelle. The command electrified the serang.