For perhaps a minute I had not been given a chance to think of the small boat, or the _Whim_, but struggling to raise my head I stared through the inky space eagerly awaiting the next flash. It came almost at once, bringing into image the Cove as if a million green calcium lights were focused there. This was but for an instant, yet such is the peculiar effect of lightning that in the following blackness each detail of the scene remained photographed upon my retinæ. I saw the turbulent waters apparently sweeping, as a mill race, out to sea; I saw a lone palm, that had formerly stood in dignified solitude upon a nearby point of land, now bent in the wildest agony, its leafy top resembling an umbrella turned inside out. I saw the _Whim_, greenish white in a greenish foam, heeled over till her masts were all but on the waves and her mainsail, half torn from its boom, snapping in the wind. In this fashion she was being driven at breakneck speed across the Gulf. I thought--I tried to think--that I had seen a small boat being dragged behind. Surely my men had reached her!
But another flash, and still another, brought no greater assurance of this. Each showed the yacht farther away, more blurred by rain, until the distance became too great for me to make her out at all.
And then another sky-splitting flame photographed a sight that made my blood congeal. I got but an instantaneous glimpse of it from the corner of my eye before the world became wrapped again in darkness--but something had been there, some huge, horrible monster was rising out of the water and waddling toward me. I had seen two long dripping arms, or feelers, extending in my direction. Crouched, with my nerves on fire, I waited. The rifles and revolvers were wrapped in the canvas and could not be reached in time; there was nothing to do but wait till this thing touched me.
It seemed an age before the heavens split again, and then I gave a yell wilder than the lashing rain, a yell of joy; for, staggering up the beach was Smilax, true to his name with a grin so broad that the greenish glare flickered on his teeth.
His sense of direction was either extremely acute or he possessed the eyes of a cat, for in the following darkness I felt a hand grasp my shoulder and push me toward the trees. Obediently I yielded. Then above the storm I heard him tearing leaves from the smaller palms until, by overlapping them against some bushes so they would be held by the wind, he constructed a lean-to--in the circumstances a most creditable achievement--beneath which I crawled.