found Martin Wingate ashore, diverting himself as best a prisoner under guard could possibly do; for under guard he most decidedly was. As he wandered along the beach, the eye of the saturnine Zanelli observed him from no great distance.
“This comes to an absolute game of blackjacking and hold-up,” Wingate analyzed the situation. He had seen the yacht's tender—long, slender, and speedy—emerge from behind a wooded point and fade away toward the mainland, which he knew lay somewhere off to westward. “The wireless Jaccard forced me to send, and the note I had to give him, will open my safe deposit box for him at the Southern Trust Company, right enough! I'll be lucky if the damned crook doesn't cut and run, after that, and leave me here high and dry!”
The prospect of being deprived of his drug terrified him even more than that of losing a few hundred thousand dollars. He cursed Jaccard, morphine, sea, and sky—everything but his own enslaving habit. In poisonous bad humor, he pushed on along the sand.
Yes, Jaccard had him sewed up, tight and fast—no doubt of that! The captain had him outplayed at every point. Even the chance of escape by suicide was cut off, with the watchful Zanelli ever on guard. Was there anything Jaccard had overlooked? Absolutely nothing, even to the explanation as to why Wingate needed money.
“Ready cash to close an important real estate deal here at Beaufort,” the wireless message had said.
Yes, that would get by. It was reasonable enough to suppose that the yacht had really put in at Beaufort. The wireless in code, and the note signed with Wingate's own signature, would suffice for all demands. Never was any rat in a trap so rat-proof as he was now!
Then hope whispered, as hope always does, in darkest moments:
“Cheer up! Something may happen yet!”
Something, the financier told himself, was bound to turn up before these crooks stripped him bare. But what? His well-known erratic habits favored the plotters. He might vanish from the world, almost indefinitely, without exciting suspicion. More than once he had disappeared for a month or two, without anybody seeming to notice, to care.
“Another sanitarium, perhaps!”—that would cover much.
“Damn them, they may pick me to the bare bones!” Wingate's thought swung back to low ebb. “Never was a plot more carefully organized than this!”
He groaned at thought of adventurers like these making ducks and drakes of his fortune.
It was now financial worry, more than physical pain, that oppressed him. In body, he felt as well as usual—which, though far from good health, was at least bearable. Before Jaccard had taken his departure, Wingate had bought and paid for six more tablets. Though this purchase had used up all his eight thousand dollars, the supply would keep him going for nearly twenty-four hours. He knew that he would be free from pain for practically a whole day—a blessed assurance!
For the immediate present, his real terror lurked in the possibility that Jaccard might never come back at all. Wingate weighed the captain's statement:
“Of course I'll come back, because if I stick with the game I can get more out of it, in the end, than as if I bolted now with what I can get my hands on.”
Yes—that sounded reasonable. Wingate could only hope and pray that the captain meant it. Otherwise, unspeakable agony loomed inevitable.
Strange it seemed that human fear and hate and anguish could exist in so halcyon an island! A charming place, that—one of the innumerable sea islands strewn along the Southern coast. Back from the beach rolled dunes, grass-grown and topped with palmettos that whispered in the softest of ocean breezes. Among the semitropical undergrowth wild goats bleated, trampled, browsed—descendants, no doubt, of some that long ago had been cast ashore from shipwrecked vessels, or had been left by fishermen, beach combers, or the like.
The beach itself stretched in a long curve, gleaming in the bright sunshine. Here and there some ship's timber or twisted bit of iron told of hurricanes. Now and again double rows of marks showed where great lumbering sea tortoises had dragged themselves up to lay their eggs, or had again plowed back to the Atlantic.
Underfoot, billions of sea shells glistened and as Wingate trod upon them—small conchs, angel wings, earrings, bull's-eyes, and many another species common to those latitudes. What a paradise for a conchologist! Even in spite of his mental perturbation, Wingate could not refrain from picking up a few, admiring their rare perfection of form, their delicate and lustrous gradations of color. How lavish nature was in wasted beauty!