A voice aroused him from his stupefaction. "Where am I ... where am I?" Ruth Allaire was asking in a frightened whisper. "That terrible thing--" She shuddered violently as memory returned to show again the horror she had witnessed. "Where are we, Robert? And the _Adelaide_--where is it?"
Thorpe turned slowly. The insane turmoil of the past hour had numbed his brain, stunned him.
"The _Adelaide_--" he mumbled, and groped fumblingly for coherent thoughts. He stared at the girl. She was half-risen from the floor where he had laid her, and the sight of her quivering face brought reason again to his mind. He knelt tenderly beside her and raised her in his arms.
"Where is the yacht?" she repeated. "The _Adelaide_?"
"Gone," Thorpe told her. "Lost!" A thought struck him.
"Lost," she repeated. "The _Adelaide_--lost!... No," she added in belated response to Thorpe's question. "Daddy was not there. But the men--Captain MacPherson ... that horrible monster...." She buried her face in her hands as she realized what Thorpe's silence meant.
He held the trembling figure close as the girl whispered: "Where are we, Robert? Are we safe?"
"We may win through yet," he told her through grim, set lips. He realized abruptly that he was seeing the face of Ruth Allaire in the light. He had left a lantern burning! He withdrew his arms from about her and sprang quickly to his feet to put out the tell-tale light. In darkness and quiet was their only safety. And he knew as he sprang that he had waited too long. A soft body crashed heavily on the deck outside.
The girl's voice was shrill with terror as she began a question. Thorpe's hand pressed upon her lips in the dark where he stood waiting--waiting.
A luminous something was glowing outside the cabin. It searched and prodded about the deserted deck to whip upward at the audible hiss of wet carbide. Another appeared; the rifle came slowly to the man's shoulder as a pair of jaws gaped glowingly beyond the windows and an eye stared unblinkingly from its hornlike sheath. It crashed madly against the walls of the wireless room to shatter the glass and make kindling of the woodwork of the sash. Thorpe fired once and again before the specter vanished, and he knew with sickening certainty that the wounds were only messages to some central brain that would send other ravening tentacles against them. But the oak bars had held.