EILA came aft a little after midnight.
“I'm a pig,” she said, “sleeping all this time. But it's done me a world of good aside from making me thoroughly ashamed of myself. How it's cleared up! The stars are wonderful, and I can read the compass by the moon. What's my course, Captain Chalmers?”
The few hours rest had given her a grip on her courage once again and she was her old audacious self.
“Turn in, skipper,” she said. “I'll call you at eight bells. You'll have to trust me. We left the poor old alarm-clock behind in the hurry.”
He found some clothes arranged to pad the bottom boards and with his head on the same pillow she had used, still fragrant with her hair, floated off into restful unconsciousness.
They had breakfast when she called him and then started to overhaul their engine. Finally adjusted and oiled from a supply they discovered in one of the drums, they filled the gasoline tank, primed it, and Chalmers, practically his own man again, heaved on the fly-wheel. There was a spatter and a buzz and then—inaction. They tried again and again, applying all their mutual knowledge without results, while the boat rocked gently on a breezeless sea.
At last, spattered and smeared with grease, they looked at each other in sympathetic disgust. Leila wrinkled her brows.
“The batteries are all right, we've got a good spark, the cylinders are clean, carbureter's in shape, gasoline I know was strained before it went in the drums. It's just sheer perverseness. It was always like that. It would run like a clock for days and then when you most wanted it, sulk till it got to feeling better.”
Chalmers laughed.
“Don't make faces at it,” he said. “You look demoniacal with those smuts on your cheeks and chin. Give it a rest.”
“You have a large one on your nose,” she answered. “I'm not going to give in to the beast.”
He straightened up, cramped from stooping over the engine. Then he reached quietly for the binoculars. The field showed him a double canoe, its mat sail flapping above the platform deck that swarmed with men, paddles flashing as the men in the canoes forced the craft along toward them.
“I wonder if they got blown out of their island,” he asked himself, “or if it sunk under them like ours. They don't seem particularly friendly. Let's hope it's curiosity, though I don't like the armory. And not wind enough to fill a fan. We're still in the woods.”
The canoe was coming up rapidly, the natives brandishing their spears. Chalmers picked up his Winchester, filled the chamber and spilled a lot of cartridges where they would be handy. Leila turned at the rattle they made.
“Your friends the savages,” he said. “It seems we are not out of our troubles. But I'll handle them. I'm not going to let them get within arrow range if I can help it. You've got your hands full with that engine. Coax it. If you can get it to running we can laugh at them. At present we look over-easy.”
He sighted, resting the barrel on the gunwale, crouching well down, and fired. The bullet went high through the sail but he depressed his muzzle and the next sang true. One of the savages on the platform tossed up his arms and fell into the sea, while the others yelled and brandished their weapons. A score of arrows whizzed toward the whale boat but fell short half-way.
Three men were down now but the canoe came on. Fire as he might, they would reach them, with overwhelming numbers, within a minute or two. He began trying to pick off the paddlers, but every time he paused to refill the magazine the gap between them closed ominously.
The barrel burned his fingers. Behind him he sensed Leila throwing over the wheel, repriming the stubborn cylinders, while she talked to the engine as if it were a refractory child. Twice she got a response that failed as soon as it had raised hope.
The arrows were coming thick now, feathering the sides of the boat, singing over him as he crouched.
“Lucky they haven't sense enough to try a dropping shot,” he muttered. “Wonder if they're poisoned. Ah! I got you.”
A tall Micronesian, bushy-haired, tinkling with brass armlets, who appeared to be the leader, spun about and fell from the deck into one of the canoes. There was instant confusion and the craft halted while Chalmers pumped shot after shot into the mass of them. Then they came on again, only fifty yards away. The air filled with their imprecations.
JUST then the engine coughed, snorted, coughed again, and settled down into a steady puttera-pattera that was music to Chalmers's ears. The screw churned the water and the whale-boat lurched ahead.
“Keep back there!” he called to Leila. “We'll be out of it in a minute.”