No fires were lit on the fishing beach that evening, nor did the wind from across the lagoon bring any sound of singing from the fishermen.
Floyd remained at the lookout post while Isbel, returning to the house, put everything in order and gave a last touch to the defenses and a last look around. Then she returned and took her place beside him.
The moon, stronger to-night, yellow and brilliant, hung in the apple-green dusk of the eastern sky. It looked exactly like the quarter of a crystallized orange; then, as the sky steadily and swiftly darkened, it lost its yellow tinge and became a sickle of frosted silver.
The light was powerful enough to sparkle up the whole lagoon and show the reef like a curving gray road set on either side with the lagoon water and the foam of the sea.
The fishing beach showed clearly, and the grove, even the tents could be made out as gray flecks against the darkness of the trees, but sign of life there was none.
"I would like it better if we could see more of them," said Floyd. "They are a lot too quiet."
"They will come to-night, I think," said Isbel. "They are hiding now and talking. Sru will lead them."
[Pg 180]Floyd laughed. "He led them finely on the beach over there this afternoon," said he, "lying on his stomach all the time!"
"That is why I fear him," said Isbel. "He is very clever; the others are not clever, but they are good to fight. Sru is the head; they are the hands. Sru is a devil."
"You did not know what Sru was that time you left me and went back to them," said he.
"No," replied Isbel; "I thought he was good then. He said to me: 'Why not come back to your own people?' The words he said to me grew in my mind like seeds in the ground. I did not know you then. I thought you were the same as Schumer."
"You know me now."
"Yes," replied Isbel, "I know you now."
He could see her profile against the stars and the line of her delicately shaped head. She was sitting with her hands about her knees, in just the same position as on the day when, drawing near the beach, Schumer had stood to receive him, and Isbel had sat watching, seemingly indifferent, gazing at him with those eyes whose gaze held so much of the unknown.
She wore a flower in her hair that day, and she wore a flower in her hair to-night, a perfumed blossom plucked as she was passing through the grove. The scent of it came to him with a trace of the hot, gorse-like perfume of her hair, and for a moment he forgot Sru, the island, the fight on the beach, and the whole desperate position. For a moment only. As they sat beneath the stars, watching the moonlight grow stronger upon the lagoon water and the reef, suddenly from away out there came a cry like the sudden clam[Pg 181]oring of sea fowl. A sound fierce and sharp and with the ring of triumph in it. The invisibility of the enemy and the absolute silence they had maintained up till now lent the sound a weird significance.
"They are starting," said Floyd.
Isbel nodded. She said nothing; she was listening. Then she said: "They will have been talking, all sitting round as they were to-day. Sru will have been making plans to come here and kill us. Then when all their minds went together like men with spears they shouted like that and jumped to their feet and started."
She spoke like a person who was watching it all in some magic glass, slowly and in a dreamy manner and with a detachment as though what she were viewing had nothing to do with them.
"They'll start more before I have done with them," said Floyd viciously.
The events of the day, the tension of waiting, and that shout, cruel as a barbed spear coming out of the night, had raised the fierce fighting spirit of his race, a spirit all the more potent and terrible from the underlying sobriety that tempers its fierceness and levity.
"It's funny to think we may be knocked out before the sun rises again," said he. "What do you think happens to a man when he's dead, Isbel?"
"I don't know. It is, I think, all the same as before he is born. He doesn't know."
"That's what I have often thought myself," said he. "Look! What is that?"
Away toward the far end of the reef they saw moving points upon the coral. Huge insects seemed crawl[Pg 182]ing here and there, aimlessly at first, and now approaching nearer.
"They are coming," said Floyd, seizing a rifle. "They are spreading themselves out, and that confounded coral gives them good sheltering places. We must stop them if possible."
He stood up, and, putting the rifle to his shoulder, aimed it at the nearest moving spot and fired. He continued blazing away till the chambers were empty. The movement ceased, but almost immediately it recommenced, and now they could see the brown figures crouching and crawling, spread out fanwise, taking cover at every projection, and always advancing closer.
It was almost impossible to fire effectively, owing to the uncertain light and the fact that at the first flash every figure fell flat or dodged behind cover.
Between the rough coral and the point where they stood lay forty yards or so of smooth ground, across which the final rush would be made.
"It seems we can't stop them," said Floyd as he emptied the contents of the second rifle, while the girl reloaded, "and once they get near the edge of that smooth bit they'll rush us. Get everything together when I give the word and make back for the house. Ah, I had one then!"
A shriek following the shot he had just fired told of a hit, but it did not stop the advance. On the contrary, the wretches had now reached the psychological point, the point where instinct told them collectively that a rush must surely succeed, and where optimism told them individually that it was the next man who would be hit.
[Pg 183]They left cover boldly, and, heedless of the rough coral, of the pitfalls and sharp edges, leaped to the attack like bounding kangaroos.
Floyd bagged two of them with his two last shots; then calling to Isbel, who had also been firing, he led the way through the trees toward the house.
Isbel, with forethought, had lit the lamp in the main room, and the glow of it shining through the loopholes in the walls showed them their way. Once inside, they barred the door, placed the guns on the table, and began to reload.
They did not speak a word. Coolly and swiftly they shoved the cartridges in their places, and then, each with a rifle, stood at attention to the hell of voices from outside.
Never could Floyd have believed that human beings were capable of such sounds of ferocity and malevolence. Only in the long boo-hoo of the storm that had torn the bones of the Tonga to pieces had he heard anything like this outburst.
Fists and feet were thundering at the door, spear points poking through the openings in the walls, but all that was nothing to the uproar of the voices. The calling of monkeys and the shrieks of parrots seemed mixed with the howl of hyenas, and more terrible than these came an incessant, fierce whistling, harsh as the whistling of steam.
Floyd was less a philosopher than a man of action, yet even so, and though he had no time for philosophy in such a crisis, his mind for a moment was held by one stupendous fact—these fiends storming the house were not devils just let loose from the infernal regions; they were the "hands."
[Pg 184]The men he had worked with and overseen, pleasant and childlike creatures full of fun and laughter, most of them. It is true that many of them had, when in repose, that hard, set expression which seems to have come from ages of watching across the sun blaze on the sea, but their faces could express good humor, one might say, fluently, and as they had always been well treated on the island they had never cause to express anything else.
When Floyd had seen them first on the day that he and Schumer had boarded the Southern Cross they had struck him as a very hard lot, and a good deal of that expression had come from the shell nose rings and the slit ear lobes distinguishing most of them; as he got to know them better that impression became less vivid. Yet it had been the right one. The shell nose rings and split ear lobes were surely "features" inasmuch as they spoke of ages and ages of savagery, blood, and darkness.
Yet the second impression had been right in its way. Despite all their savagery these people were human, had in them a certain bonhomie and sense of humor, and possessed many of those traits which we associate with the word "gentleman." The latter curious fact had been impressed on Floyd several times in his dealings with them. Sru, for i............