XI
Of a sudden the door flung back, and the dim bulk of Aalborg—hulking, stoop-shouldered—vaguely appeared.
As the Swede came lumbering out into the cockpit, Wingate struck. He spared not that blow, but swung the club with all his reviving force. Whether it killed or not, little cared he.
Aalborg went down like a poled ox, sprawling over the gunwale. Wingate made a furious effort, heaved the insensible man, and rolled him out on the rain-drenched wharf. Limp as a sack of potatoes, the seaman lay there, stunned. Lucky for him that his skull was as thick as his wits!
On the instant, with a profane shout, the second man came lunging out of the cuddy, and grappled for the intruder. Wingate drove his club, hit only the shoulder—and the man had him. He felt himself mastered, borne down, wrenched backward. The club skittered away.
For a moment, by the dim tremble of light through the cuddy door, they struggled. The seaman was a match for five such weaklings as Wingate.
No time, now, for the rules of the game! Wingate got hold of a finger and bent it sharply back. Another fraction of an inch, and the bone would have snapped.
Pain-maddened, the seaman for an instant loosed his hold. Wingate slipped down, away. He sprawled into the cuddy. With an incoherent yell the sailor stooped to follow, to trap him there.
Wingate snatched the lamp from its gimbals and let fly at close range. It struck just above the sailor's eyes. Stunned, blinded with splashing oil, the man slumped backward. Wingate scrambled up out of the cuddy, and, as the sailor staggered to his feet, landed a fist at the point of the jaw.
“Go on! Jump!” he shouted. “Off of here—get off!”
Groggy, the sailor realized discretion's better part, and made a clumsy leap. He missed the wharf, and splashed in a boiling tangle of foam.
As he came up, grappling for the tender's rail, Wingate found the club and battered the man's clutching fingers. They relaxed. Howling in some incomprehensible tongue, the sailor plunged again, surged up, and scrabbled at the palmetto logs.
“Go on—beat it!” roared Wingate, now quite reverted to the language of everyday Americans. “Get out of here, or I'll shoot!”
The empty threat carried. The sailor let go his hold of the wharf, turned, and struck out for the shore. Carried by the combing waves, he heaved mightily toward the sands. The water was shoal. Almost at once he found footing, and went wallowing ashore.
“Go on—get away, or I'll fill you full of lead!”
By the vague light Wingate saw a dark something move along the beach, blend with the shadows, and disappear. Laughing, he dropped his club and plunged below once more.
Down in the cuddy it was darker than King Tut's pocket, but Wingate knew the place well. This was his own boat, in which he had cruised thousands of miles through bayous and lagoons, taking side trips from the yacht. He knew where matches were usually kept, on a little shelf forward; and he found a box there. A minute, and he had lighted the second lamp, and was ready for quick action.
The engine lay in a little compartment aft of the cuddy. Wingate stooped down into that space, threw in the self-starter, and got the engine going. Smoothly, beautifully, she purred. He hurried on deck, cast off the painter, took the wheel, and flung in the full speed ahead. As the tender lurched forward, he swung to port just in time to keep her from bashing her nose against the wharf.
The tender scraped, thumped, turned clear, and gathered speed, slitting the rollers in the cove. From the beach Wingate heard a yell.
He turned, and consigned the seaman to the hottest of all possible hot places.
“I only hope he'll stick around here just five minutes!” thought he. “Then he can run to give the alarm, and be damned to him! Five minutes' start is all I want!”
Laughing, he swung the prow toward the cove entrance and drove the swift-speeding tender for the open sea. At full tilt he urged her. There might be shoals, mud flats, sand bars—little he knew or cared. Everything was staked now on just one factor—speed.
As the tender surged out of the cove and got away from its slight shelter, the full drive of the storm caught her. Buffeted by wind and rain, Wingate crouched at the wheel. Giant fists seemed pounding at him. The motor boat began to leap wildly, with solid black seas combing over. Bravely she headed into the loud turmoil, with all six cylinders doing their prettiest.
Wingate thanked Heaven that he had spared no expense on the craft. Had she failed him now, right soon would all his battle have been ended, all his problems solved!
He cleared the island, then swung north with it on his starboard hand, the vague loom of it just discernible as a low black blot against the first hints of daybreak. The seas now took him on the port bow, and set the little boat dancing like a drunken dervish. Brine dripped and streamed everywhere. It choked and blinded Wingate, but still he held on. The gale snatched the tops off the waves and flung them in mad handfuls. Dim spray cut and stung. Already the cockpit was sloshing in white torrents around his feet. A deafening tumult of tormented waters filled the air; the world became a ravening confusion that clutched to drag him down. Abysses yawned between trundling hills of sea, and ever the inboard-falling crests kept filling the frail craft.
“She'll be foundering soon,” Wingate realized.
Somehow, little enough he seemed to care. The exultation of the moment thrilled him, and death held no terrors. Even that would be escape from slavery!
More sober judgment, however, warned him to take no avoidable risks. He put the tender up square into the wind, dived below, and routed a pail and a bit of rope from the engine compartment. Up again, he becketed the wheel, to held her into the eye of the storm, and then fell to bailing with great energy. The last vestiges of cobwebs were swept from his brain. The blood leaped in his arteries. He felt himself a man, able to fight a man's battle. Drenched, sweating, he labored—and laughed.
Presently the cockpit was fairly empty, and Wingate swung on his course again. His distance at sea was now so great that, in order to make a run for the place where he thought the Voyageur was lying, he could take the waves on his port quarter. The tender shipped little water on this cut, and quickened speed. Before long the northern end of the island glimmered vaguely in sight, and Wingate began spying as best he could for the cove itself.
He reduced speed with the control at the wheel, and let the tender jog. A few minutes later he made out the cove entrance. Keeping only seaway, he steered in, found calmer water, and presently saw the yacht lying not far from land, bow on to him.
Now he shut off all power, and in silence came drifting down upon the Voyageur. No light showed aboard her, nor was there any visible sign that the alarm had been given.
“If nothing breaks in the next five minutes,” he realized, with a surge of exultation, “I'll be aboard her, and the fun will begin!”
Nothing broke. His prophecy came true. As it became certain that he would make the yacht, he abandoned the wheel, went forward, and, with the painter in hand, stood alert. The tender, borne forward by long combers, slipped in past the anchor chain. Wingate flung the painter around a bobstay, and made fast. The tender came about, and lay against the yacht's bows—much to the detriment of paint and varnish, but what did trifles matter?
Wingate watched his chance, caught the stay, pulled himself up, and came inboard over the forecastle rail in approved piratical style.
Once there, he crouched to rest and breathe, to spy out the prospect, and to make ready for the next move.
Through the storm clouds, daylight was now plainly beginning to glimmer. Already objects were growing half visible on the gleaming, rain-scoured deck. The beach, too, could be vaguely seen; and as Wingate noted the absence of the dinghy there, he silently laughed.
“Not much to fear from that quarter, after all!” he assured himself. “Everything depends on what I'm going to find aboard the yacht.”
He perceived, now, that in the stress of getting aboard he had forgotten his club, and that he possessed no weapon. That would never do! He remembered that in the little pilot house a pair of binoculars were always kept, in a leather case with a shoulder-strap. Those binoculars—just the thing!
He crept aft, silently, furtively, as if he had been a robber, instead of being aboard his own yacht. The continuing drum of the rain stood him in good stead. He entered the pilot house, found the binoculars in their case, and, with the strap swinging like David's sling from a determined fist, silently made his way down the cabin companion.
In the main cabin it was almost pitch dark, for hardly the ghostliest glimmer seeped through the skylight. A cadenced snoring told him that somebody was there—but who? If one of the engineers, or both, no matter. It could not be the third seaman or the cook, for both of them bunked forward. The only real peril lurked in Zanelli or the captain. Were they ashore, or, by ill chance, had one of them passed the night aboard the yacht?
“Well, the only way to find out is to go and see!” Wingate realized.
His heart was beating a trifle fast, but he felt singularly calm, and even elated. The next few moments, he knew, were going to decide many things—perhaps even life or death.
He turned first to the door of the little cabin occupied by Zanelli. With infinite caution he crept to it, tried the knob, turned it, and swung the door. He listened. No sound of breathing! He advanced, groping for the bunk. Empty!
With a gulp of relief he retreated, closing the door. The yacht was cradling in the swell piled into the cove by the storm. Wingate must leave no loose doors to bang, to give the alarm.
“Now, then, for the captain!” thought he, creeping toward Jaccard's room, across the main cabin.
This door was on the hook. A bad sign, that! It almost surely meant that Jaccard was within.
Yes—as Wingate stood listening, he heard a slow, measured breathing. Now, then, for the captain, indeed!
Wingate did not hesitate. His fighting blood was up. No great strength of muscle was his, as yet; but heart and soul were a crusader's. Noiselessly he reached up, slipped the hook free, and carefully lowered it. He opened the door, thanking all the gods that it did not creak. He entered, closed the door, and found himself within three feet of the redoubtable Jaccard.
Just where the electric light was, Wingate well knew. When the yacht's dynamo was idle, storage batteries fed all the lights. There was sure to be current. He reached for the little chain, twitched it, and flooded the cabin with a brilliant glare.
Right in front of him the captain lay, in rather absurdly striped pyjamas. It seemed ridiculous that a man of his immense strength should wear striped pyjamas—unheroic, somehow, and out of keeping. This inconsequential thought flicked through Wingate's alert brain. He saw, too, the captain's huge, hairy forearm, and the great hand over the edge of the bunk—a hand so large that a silver quarter would pass through Jaccard's finger ring. Against an arm and a hand like those, what could Wingate hope to accomplish?
Suddenly he heard his own voice:
“Get up, you! Wake up!”
“Huh?” grunted the captain, and heaved over in the bunk.
He opened stupid, dazed eyes. Then, as these focused on Wingate—an extraordinary figure in drenched, ink-soaked flannels—they widened with an astonishment so vast that it was almost terror.
Jaccard swung his feet to the floor with a bellow:
“Here, you damned fool! Let me ex—”
Wingate struck.
A pair of binoculars at the end of a leather strap makes a very pretty slung shot. Wingate put every ounce of his hate and of his rage into that whirling blow. The binoculars crashed down on Jaccard's skull, just above the right eye; and the captain, for all his bulk and strength, lunged forward, yammering, on both knees.
Smash!
The second blow finished him. He reeled and went flat, knocked out as completely as if he had connected with Jack Dempsey's fist.
For a moment Wingate stood ready with the now irreparably broken binoculars, should any more punishment be needed. None was—none whatever. The two crashes had done for Jaccard, temporarily, yet with entire efficiency.
So far, victory smiled. But what lay still ahead?
Wingate dropped the binoculars and began, in military parlance, to consolidate his position. Before any interference should develop, he had much to do.
First of all he locked the cabin door. Then, turning to the bunk, he hauled off both sheets and tore them into strips about six inches wide. That there was need of haste was proved by the fact that the snoring of one of the engineers had stopped, and a voice had begun to make unintelligible sounds.
Wingate dragged the captain's feet together and tied them with a good many more strips than were necessary. He hauled the muscular hands side by side, behind Jaccard's back—rolling the limp figure over, not without difficulty—and similarly lashed them. Then he took a few strong hitches between hands and ankles, and presently had the captain hog-tied in a manner that would have baffled anybody less clever than Houdini.
This done, and leaving Jaccard on the floor, he jerked open the captain's desk and table drawers in the most unceremonious manner possible. He found stacks of bills and securities neatly fastened with rubber bands, and jammed them into his coat pockets, so that he bulged with wealth on both sides, more like a buccaneer than a business man.
“Got that back again, by the Lord Harry, eh?” he exulted with a laugh of triumph. “And—hello, what's this?”
“This” was a revolver, the captain's revolver—fully loaded, too. Wingate lost no time in ascertaining that fact. He had hardly assured himself the six-gun carried cartridges, when a loud banging on the door turned him from the desk.
“What the hell's going on in there, anyhow?” demanded an irate voice. “Somebody gone crazy? Captain Jaccard, sir! Hello, captain! Where are you?”
Wingate leveled the revolver at the door.
“Stand back away from that door!” he commanded. “I've got a gun, and I mean business. I'm going to count five, and then shoot through the panel. You've had fair warning!”
He began to count. The sound of scurrying feet died to tense silence.
At five, Wingate let go. The crash of it, in that tiny cabin, was deafening. Through the glossy paneling of the door a splintered hole appeared. The moral effect of that shot, he calculated, exceeded many volumes of argument.
He unlocked the door, flung it open, and walked out, with the gun in his hand. At the far end of the cabin, with the sleep hardly as yet scared out of their eyes, Hazeltine and MacIvor crouched in terror of sudden death. And small wonder! The ink-stained, drenched, bewhiskered figure that confronted them with blazing eyes of rage, covering them with a revolver, was enough to have put the fear of God into any man. A maniac Wingate looked—no less. His words were rational enough, however.
“Listen, you two!” he flung at them. “You've got your choice of just two things. Obey me, and get paid as men never were paid before. Disobey me, and get killed. This yacht's changed hands. I'm master now. Weigh anchor! Get that engine going! Put the seaman at the wheel! We're going back to Queensport, now!”