Miller picked up a bucket, seized a rope, attached it to the handle, and slung it overboard. He placed it, brimmed with water, at her feet. She looked up again, eyed him silently and without thanks, dipped her handkerchief in the water and laved Aylmer's face. And Miller himself remained silent, as if he would force the first comment from her, as if he probed for information by mere inertness. Had he been heard? She guessed that he was asking himself--and by force of silence, her--this question.
A sudden instinct not to betray herself gripped her. Aylmer? Was not he an example of a like reticence? He had not revealed the fact that his hands were free till circumstances had revealed it, with a vengeance. She would follow this example and so tell nothing. She pillowed Aylmer's head gently upon a coil of rope and stood up.
"The hope of rescue is gone then?" she said quietly. "There is no chance of their rounding the island, and encountering us later?"
"They seldom carry search-lights--craft of that size, in the Spanish navy, at any rate. No, Muhammed's seamanship has taken the trick this time. Spanish captains do not waste coal lavishly, and what, after all, have they to go on. Merely the words 'Help! Prisoners!' It might easily have been the vagary of some half-drunken sponge-fisher."
"That was what he signalled?" she said. "You understood that?"
"I know the international code," he said simply. He looked down at Aylmer again. "His escapade has not improved our position," he added. "When Landon comes to himself--"
"He is not seriously wounded, then?" she cried in quick disappointment. "I had hoped--I had prayed--"
"That he had been killed," she answered slowly. "Is there any escape from the net of villainy in which he has us all entrapped?"
He looked at her silently, and the dawn of a hard smile glimmered about his lips. He pointed aft.
"Will you come and look?" he said. "Perhaps I have undervalued your prayers. I am no surgeon, but I would wager a larger sum on his reviving than I would on the recovery of--this."
He touched Aylmer with the point of his foot. There was no ungentleness in the action, but it seemed instinctive--the gesture of an autocrat or of a dictator, seeing all men under his feet.