The Trey o' Hearts/Chapter 15
CHAPTER XV
Dead Reckoning
SOME ten minutes later a hail from the deck disturbed the lovers.
"Below there! I say—Law!—wind a-coming!"
"Right O! Half a minute!"
But that stipulated delay was several times multiplied before Alan showed up on deck, to find Barcus bending a laborious back to the capstan. Already a breath of coolness stole through the warm languor of the night: blocks creaked, canvas shivered: there was a sibilant murmur in the water outside.
"Lend a hand, can't you?" Barcus complained. "I didn't interrupt you just to get an audience. The sooner we get this anchor in"
"But I don't want the anchor," Alan protested. "It isn't my anchor. I say, cut the cable—or let it run."
Barcus stepped back from the capstan and kicked open the pawl, with the result that the windlass began merrily to unwind.
"My compliments! I never thought of that. If you'd only betray as much intelligence in managing your private affairs"
Alan checked him. "What's that?" he demanded in a tone tense with apprehension. The rumbling of a marine motor drifted down on the wings of the sluggish winds.
"Don't ask me. I'm afraid to guess!"
"But they couldn't possibly"
"Since when did you set up to be a judge of possibilities? Nothing probable ever happened to you 's far's I can make out. I know there are two life-saving stations on Nauset, both with modern equipment—motor lifeboats and all. Our business is to get out of here quick, and not advertise our exit, either. Take that port light in and dowse it, while I do the same by the starboard. Then duck below and put out the cabin lamp. Then, if this blackness holds, we may manage an invasion!"
There followed an exceedingly busy quarter of an hour. They were clever sailormen, used to all sorts of craft, and the end of that period found the schooner with sheets taut and canvas full to a good easterly breeze—the light on Monomoy Point watching them from over the starboard beam.
"Hear anything more of that power boat?" Alan asked, joining Barcus by the wheel.
"Nothing—wind too fresh."
"Better let me stand the first trick—what?"
"Nix! I know my way about these shoals blindfold, whereas you couldn't weather Monomoy safely in broad daylight. Get under the table and be a good dog—d'you hear?"
With a chuckle, Alan obediently stretched himself out on the deck.
"I say, Law! You seem pretty easy in your mind about this young woman below. Sure you ain't been stung twice?"
"Sure," Alan asserted with conviction.
"Well, I reckon you ought to know. But to me, she's the same that tried to send me to Davy Jones' locker. How did she get aboard here?"
"I fancy they chloroformed her, while she slept in that hotel in Portland. Whether or no, Rose woke up in a closed motor-car—bound and gagged, of course—and was brought aboard at Gloucester about midnight."
"Simple when you know how," Barcus commented. "Cuddle down, now, and I'll sing you to sleep." Unconsciousness like a cloud soon descended upon Alan's overwearied faculties. …
He awoke with a yawn and a shiver, in the gray of chill daybreak. A thick fog pressed heavily upon the face of the waters, and moisture beaded all things, even Alan's face and hands. Barcus stood at the wheel, reeling with weariness, his eyes half-closed In a face like a mask of fatigue.
"Can't keep up much longer," he apologized thickly; "stood it about as long as I can. Take your trick and give me forty winks."
"You're a brick!" Alan protested. "Why didn't you call me sooner?"
"No good! I knew the way—you didn't. That is, I did until this accursed fog closed down. Now—God knows where we are—by my reckoning somewhere in Nantucket Sound."
Grasping a handle on the wheel-box, he jerked it three times; and the automobile horn blared raucously a threefold response up forward.
"Keep that going, three blasts, then a minute interval—and if the devil takes care of his own we may escape being run down."
With a sigh he collapsed upon the deck, and was almost instantly asleep. Hither and yon in the obscurity fog-signals of other shipping sounded a concert of discordance—the man-power horn of a catboat crying the warning back to the deep-throated whistle of a coastwise steamship and the impertinent drumming of a motor-boat's exhaust with the muffler cut out. This last boxed the compass, sounding now here, now there, now near, now far; though the complaints of other shipping diminished in volume and died away in the distance, giving place to others, still the plutter-plutter of that motor was never altogether lost.
Vainly straining his vision against the blank pallor of the encompassing fog, Alan wondered, worried, dreaded. …
At irregular intervals, starting from proccupation, he would manipulate the brass pull on the wheel-box, provoking the horn's stuttering blasts of protest. It seemed improbable that any of the schooner's former crew could fail to recognize that weirdly singular whoop, a sound like nothing else that Alan could recall.
Only the coldest comfort was to be extracted from the reflection that, even with the aid of that fog- signal, hunting a lost schooner in those mist-masked waters was a task like that traditional one of the needle and the haystack. Alan's life of late seemed simply one endless tissue of wild improbabilities. So long as his luck held, the least likely thing was always to be considered the one thing most certain to come to pass.
And the exhaust of that restless motor-boat was never for an instant still: it echoed an incessant strumming from the surface of the waters as from some gigantic sounding-board.