CHAPTER XIII
THE LAUNCH IN THE MANGROVES
THE sun, streaming in through the bushes that fringed the mouth of Chalmer's cave, awakened him. His eyelids felt as if they were filled with a mixture of glue and sand, and each joint protested against coordinate action. He had packed every pound he could carry on the trips from the clearing, and he was still sore from the quicksand. But his mind, once roused, was speedily alert, and forced his sluggish limbs to action.
He picked up a rifle and, stepping cautiously, not to disturb the sleeping girl, made his way toward the headland that divided Safety Haven from the main beach and lagoon. The tide was washing the end of the cape, covering the quicksand and the scattered rocks as he sought for some place to climb the barrier, and get a glimpse of the enemy's operations.
The lava ridge was less steep on the side of Safety Haven, and he managed to pick a trail to the top. He had brought the glasses of the dead captain from the house, and with their aid he easily marked the cautious steps of Hamaku and Tomi, moving carefully on the schooner's decks, so as not to disturb their masters below.
“They haven't turned out yet,” he commented. “That gives us an hour or so before they'll bother their heads about us.”
He left his rifle in a shady crevice of the lava, where it would be handy when he re turned for later observation and, unencumbered, swiftly climbed down to the beach again after one comprehensive view of their little dominion. There was driftwood among the rocks and he picked some of it up, still soaked with the rain, and set it to dry in the sun for a fire.
On his way back to the caves he made a hasty visit to certain rock-masses he had noted from the top of the ridge. Despite the almost boyish frankness of Leila Denman, he realized the delicacy of the situation, if they were forced to live in the intimate contact their quarters demanded; and he wanted to spare the girl's sensitiveness as much as possible. Presently he found what he wanted, a series of rocky rooms, high-walled, open to the sky, indeed—which meant nothing in that climate and season—all connecting, two of them floored with sand and shells, the largest of the latter broken, but many perfect and exquisitely tinted.
The third chamber was reached by natural rocky steps, leading to the rim of a lava bowl some ten feet in diameter, nearly filled with sea water, crystal clear and green as an emerald. A ledge of rock ran part way 'round the interior of the basin, an ideal platform for a bather.
Chalmers, smiling at his own folly, whimsically looked for the sea naiad who should, by rights, have inhabited the pool. All the rocks showed traces of wave action; the outer entrance to the rock chambers was an arch.
All signs pointed to the fact that Motutabu had once held a higher sea level. The beach of Safety Haven had undoubtedly long been exposed to the wash of ruder waves than the quiet ripples of the narrow lagoon that rimmed it now, though the sharp uneroded spine of the headland seemed of later origin.
Chalmers was in no mind for geological problems. He was delighted with his find of a complete suite of rooms which would insure absolute privacy for Leila Denman. The problem of their defense and existence, ever present as it was with him, was constantly disturbed by thoughts of the girl, remembrances of some turn of her head, the intonation of her voice, the color of her hair, her eyes, her lips, the piquant pendule in the upper one. He caught himself whistling softly, and thinking the words:
He checked himself with an embarrassed laugh.
“Anybody would think I was in love,” he said aloud. A friendly gull, perched on a near-by rock, cocked a black eye at him, stretched its wings in a suggestive imitation of a yawn, and flapped away as if disgusted, with a throaty squawk of disdain that sounded exactly like—
“You are.”
The resemblance was so startling that Chalmers called after the bird:
“What did you say? I wonder if I am,” he asked himself.
The broaching of the subject, like the sounding of a dominant chord, seemed to set a hundred suggestions and instincts vibrating in harmony with the suggestion. The visions of her, mute in his arms, refusing to give up the pearls to Tuan Yuck, fighting with him pluckily against the odds, came to him in swift succession. He felt again the pull at his heart that had come at the touch of her fingers closing on his, and then flushed at his own foolishness.
“She's got no eyes for you, my boy,” he muttered. “And if she had you've no right to think of her. If we get out of this muddle she'll be worth a quarter of a million, to say nothing of the pearls in the lagoon.”
“I'll bet I'm a sight,” he added, not altogether irrelevantly, as he passed his hand over his sprouting beard and looked ruefully at his besmeared ducks. “I'll have to make another trip to the schooner if it's only for a razor—not to mention other things.”
All thoughts of Leila vanished from his mind as he confronted their necessities. Their supply of food was limited, aside from fish, which Leila would only touch as a last necessity, but his chief fear was lack of ammunition. He had only the cartridges that were left in the chambers of the rifles and the automatics. Tuan Yuck would be sure to think of that sooner or later, and, in the meantime, threatened attacks must be warded off.
“Good morning, Sir Sober Face.”
He rounded a pile of rocks to meet Leila, her bright hair coiled, a flush in her cheeks, and her eyes alight with friendly greeting.
“I thought you were still asleep,” she said gaily. “So I've gone about my duties on tiptoe. Look. Here's our kitchen, with a shelf just the right height for a pantry, and here's our dining-room. I've stocked the pantry, filled the kettle from the waterfall, and all I need is dry wood.”
“That's easily supplied,” said Chalmers, falling into her mood, “and if you go with me I'll show you a suite of rooms with boudoir, sun-parlor and private bath that I've taken an option on in your name. There was an impudent mermaid in possession, but I made faces at her, and she flapped her tail at me and ran—I mean swam.”
So, talking nonsense, forgetting for the moment, with the privilege of golden youth, their present perils, Chalmers showed her what he called in jest, “Number One, Beach Avenue.”
As Leila Denman finished looking delightedly about the place that Chalmers had found for her, she turned to him and held out her hand.
“I want to thank you, Mr. Chalmers,” she said. “You've been more than kind. I—I can't tell you just what it means to me. When I think of how friendless, how defenseless I might have been, and all you have done for me—of your thoughtfulness—I wish I could reciprocate it. I do appreciate it.”
Her eyes dewed with grateful tears, and Chalmers, stopping himself on the point of some such idiotic declaration that “one smile of hers was worth a lifetime of toil in her behalf,” felt his own moisten and a lump come into his throat.
“I haven't done anything,” he said as soon as speech was easy. “Nothing that I wouldn't have done for my own sister—or any one else's.”
“Why, then I'll have to adopt you as my brother,” she said.
His face fell involuntarily, and her's brightened, such being the way of a man with a maid, and vice versa. Then she laughed.
“Where's the firewood?” she asked.
Chalmers flushed guiltily. They were back to the caves already.
“Hurry up,” she called gaily as he turned away. “Call at the grocery store and get some eggs—brother!”
There was a mocking emphasis on the “brother” that he did not altogether object to. It showed she was not altogether in earnest about the relation, he thought. Then Fortune favored him. Close to where he had set the driftwood in the sun he saw some telltale furrows in the sand. He had seen similar ones before on the quiet beaches beyond Pearl Harbor, on Oahu, and he swiftly utilized a piece of wood as a spade, and carefully upturned a dozen globular objects of a dingy white, covered with leathery skin—turtle's eggs, not to be despised as an auxiliary to an island menu, and an assurance of future sustenance.
Breakfast was a meal where happiness attended appetite, and it was not until the shrinking shadows warned Chalmers time was speeding, that he resumed his full measure of responsibility.
“I want you to keep in your rock-rooms or your cave,” he said, “until I come back.”
“Why can't I come with you?”
“I don't believe there will be anything interesting on hand,” he answered. “Only a nasty climb which I have made before.”
“Very well, ungallant one,” she pouted, then changed, noting the gravity of his face. “You'll promise to let me know if it looks interesting or if I can help?” she asked.
“Surely.”
He climbed the wall of the cape once more and watched the hauling aboard of the sunken whale-boat. He was tempted to try a shot, but the sun was in his eyes. Gazing against it he failed to see the approach of Hamaku until the native had actually passed the headland and was heading shoreward for the little beach. He cautiously leveled his Winchester and sighted until the bead on the muzzle of the rifle dropped into the notch of the hindsight and aligned with the black dot of the Kanaka's head. His finger instinctively pressed the trigger until the last ounce of resistance was reached.
Then mercy reasoned with the will to kill and he aimed ahead. The bullet splashed close enough to send Hamaku plunging down like a porpoise, and swimming beneath the surface back toward the schooner. From above, Chalmers could see the motion of his body, purple in the green shoal water, wriggling like an eel.
“He'll warn them that we're on the look out,” he told himself. “I can watch the rocks at low tide. There'll be a moon soon of nights by the time the ebb shifts 'round to daylight, and then I'll have to make a boom of palm-trunks. At present I'll sleep afternoons while Leila plays watchwoman, and keep sentry nights myself.”
A call came to him, and he saw the girl running across the beach toward the cape. He waved at her in assurance of his safety, and climbed down to meet her.
“You're not hurt?” she asked breathlessly. “I heard the shot.”
“Not I,” he protested, and told her what he had seen. “They'll not trouble us for a while,” he asserted. “We'll have to keep a smart lookout, that's all.”
“I can do my share?”
He nodded. She was looking at him in a way that made him a little uncertain of what he was saying or doing.
“Steady, boy,” he muttered. “Steady. You're on duty—on honor.”
She saw his lips move, and her face blanched as she stretched out eager hands.
“You are hurt?” she declared. “What did you say? I couldn't hear you.”
“I was talking to myself,” he returned, vexed at his indiscretion. “Just foolishness.”
“Oh!” she said, and her eyes lost their anxiety for another expression, less intimate, yet full of understanding.
“You are invited to my beach boudoir,” she said, “to discuss the situation, and decide upon the division of watches.”
“They'll try to take us unawares, I imagine,” he told her when they had settled themselves. “Failing that, they'll probably go ahead and clean up the lagoon of pearls. Then they may try and navigate the schooner somewhere themselves—Sayers thinks he knows more than he really does about sailing—or they'll make some sort of an offer to us.”
“Which we'll not accept.”
“I don't know about that.”
“We can't trust them. You know that.”
“I wouldn't if there was any other way of getting you off the island. We can insist upon terms for our own protection.”
“But there is another way,” she said, while Chalmers stared open-eyed. “We brought two whale-boats on our schooner. One of them had an engine in it and a mast and sail, and father kept it for our use. After the natives landed here the first time Dad hid it in the mangroves near where we came when we moved to Safety Haven. It's there now, with several cans of gasoline!”
“That's fine,” said Chalmers. “I'm sorry it's in their territory. I hope they don't take it into their heads to go nosing in the mangroves and find it.”
“I don't think they could,” she answered. “Dad dragged it up the creek and off to one side. It's covered with vines, and a lot of those have sprouted. I could hardly see it when he pointed it out to me.”