"And is it true that none of the life-preservers they were putting on when the launch sank was ever found?" Leanor also wanted to know.
"True enough," said Sisson, "but that's not unnatural. Drowning men lay hold of whatever they can and never, never turn loose. Why, I've seen the clawlike fingers of skeletons locked around sticks that wouldn't beat up a cockroach!"
"Did you say it was a relatively calm day?" I questioned the boatman idly.
"Sure. Calm as it is right now," he answered.
I observed casually that the oarsman was gazing fixedly at Leanor. Even on him, perhaps, beauty was not entirely lost. Doubtless, too, he hid heard the gossip her arrival had set going along the wharves at Batoga. Meanwhile Leanor had made a discovery.
"Why, we're still making headway!" she broke out suddenly, "I—I thought we had stopped."
Sisson glanced down at the water, and his tanned brow broke up in vertical wrinkles of consternation. The look in his deepset eyes, though, did not, oddly enough, seem to match the perplexity written on his corrugated brow.
Our craft was sliding rapidly forward as though propelled by the oars. The phenomenon was due to a current; that much was certain, for we were moving with a flotsam of dead leaves and seaweed.
Again I screwed my body half round in the cramped bow and shot a glance ahead. God! we were shooting toward the dread spot on the alkali cliff as though drawn to it by an unseen magnet. I could see, too, that our speed was rapidly increasing.
Sisson snatched up the trailing oars and put his giant's strength against the invisible something that seemed dragging us by the keel, but all he did was to plough two futile furrows in the strange whirlpool. Our capuco glided on.
The blasé adventuress was never more beautiful. For the time, at least, life, warm and pulsating, had come back and clasped her in a joyous embrace. Her lips were parted in a smile of seemingly inexpressible delight. There was not the remotest suggestion of surprise or fear in her girlish face.
She put her helm over only when I shouted to her in wide-eyed alarm, but the keen, finlike keel of our specially built cayuco obviously did not respond. Oblique in the channel, we slithered over, ever nearer to the west wall, the unseen agent of destruction towing us with awful certainty toward the vortex. Still the surface of the water, moving with us, looked as motionless as a millpond! It was uncanny, nothing less.
I peered into the bluishly transparent depths, fascinated with wonder, and then, of a sudden, I saw that which alone might prove our salvation. Apparently we were in a writhing, powerful current, racing atop the seemingly placid undersea or sub-surface waters of the channel. I could make out many small objects spinning merrily about as they flew, submerging, toward the whirlpool.
We carried six life-belts. Two of these I snatched from their fastenings, slipped one about Leanor, and with the other but partly adjusted—for there remained no time—myself plunged out of our—as it were—bewitched craft in the direction of the west wall.
To my surprise I swam easily. When I made a deep stroke, however, I could feel strange suctorial forces tugging at my finger-tips. But for the moment I was safe.
I glanced about to see if Leanor had followed my lead. She was not in the water. I turned on my back and saw, to my utter amazement, that neither she nor Sisson had left the cayuco.
This was unaccountable indeed. And it was now clear that it was too late for them to jump, for the light boat had already begun to spin round in a circle at a point exactly opposite the alkali spot! Faster and faster it flew, the diameter of the ring in which it raced swiftly
As I swam, my shoulder collided with some obstruction. It was the west wall. I clambered up a couple of feet and sat dripping on a slime-covered shelf of slate, the identical slab on which the engineer of the sunken launch had thirsted.
I was powerless to help my companions. I could only sit and stare in near unbelief. Why—Why had they not abandoned the tiny craft with me? I saw now that neither had even so much as got hold of a life-belt. Why—?
My God! What was this I beheld? Sisson had advanced to the stern of the flying cockleshell where Leanor still sat motionless, unexcited, smiling. The charmed look of expectancy was still in her perfect face.
Sisson's voice, suddenly risen high, chilled me to the marrow. It might have been the voice of some martyr on the scaffold. He did not reveal his identity to Leanor. It was not necessary. Something—I dare not say what—enabled her in that awful moment of tragedy to know her divorced husband.
THE EXQUISITE torture of recollection had shriveled Henry Fayne's mentality and left him a semi-maniac, yet here, after all the cynical, embittering years was the physical, the carnate Henry Fayne, the long-discarded plaything of feminine caprice. His suffering was fearfully recorded in the seamed and bearded mask of his altered features.
The smile did not leave Leanor's face. The madman's voice rose in a shrill, terrible cry. He babbled and sputtered in consuming rage, but I caught the current of his wild harangue. He had waited all the years for this opportunity; he had followed her from Bandora, had laid all his plans with infinite nicety to avenge the wreck which Leanor had made of his life.
But the woman laughed defiantly, tensely; laughed derisively, full in the bearded face.
"You have waited too long, Henry," she said, evenly yet with a note of triumph in her tone; "I've worn threadbare every allurement of life. Today I came here seeking my last adventure—a sensation at once new and ultimate—death!"
It was here that the miracle supervened.
Chagrin, fierce and awful, distorted the hairy vagabond's face, and, balancing himself precariously in the crazily whirling dugout, he raised a great clenched fist. I once had seen a laughing man struck by lightning. As the rending voltage shot through him the muscles of his face had relaxed slowly, queerly, as if from incredulity, just as the furious, drawn face of Henry Fayne relaxed now. The menacing fist unclinched and fell limply at his side.
Of all the examples of thwarted vengeance I had ever seen on the stage, or off, this episode from real life was the most dramatic.
The boat had circled swiftly in to the center of the vortex and now spun crazily for a moment as though on a fixed pivot, like a weather-vane. Then it capriciously resumed its first tactics, only it now raced inversely in a rapidly widening circle, running well down in the water, as though from some powerful submarine attraction.
That the spurious boatman was a victim of some hopeless form of insanity I was certain when I saw him drop to his knees and extend both his great hands in evident entreaty to the woman who had stripped him of his honor and, driven him, a driveling idio-maniac, into exile. Leanor sat impassive, but the madman continued to supplicate.
