As It Was in the Beginning Part 31

Two half-cylindrical sections of this useful plant he had lashed to eight-foot poles of considerable stiffness to complete a pair of oars.

His rowlocks, saved from the smelting processes, he finally tested in their sockets, where a rigid bridge had been stoutly secured across his raftlike contrivance, and found them all he could desire. The seat he had planned to occupy in rowing he abandoned now as quite superfluous.

He felt he must lose no time in draining the cave, for possible use in a siege. There was no other task that had been altogether neglected.

The flagpole was once more standing on the terrace; abundant fuse was made, dried, coiled, and safely stored from damp or accident, and a mold was hardening in the fire for running lead slugs that would make the cannon effective.

For this latter need he meant to sacrifice his hammer. It, with the lead he had saved before, would supply some six or seven pounds of this needful ammunition. Now, as he swiftly braided three slender creepers in a "painter" for his crudely fas.h.i.+oned catamaran, he glanced at the tide inquiringly, and likewise up at the sun. There was over an hour in which to get to the cave, lodge a bomb in the ledge, and blow out the dam that held back the water, but the tide was still running against him.

With ten feet only of his mooring-line completed, he abandoned the braiding impatiently, secured one end to his raft at the estuary's entrance, and, wading in behind the clumsy structure, launched it with one impetuous heave across the sandbar to the sea. Boarding immediately with his oars, he rowed it far enough only to prove he could drive it against the tide, and then brought it back to the sh.o.r.e.

"One bomb and a torch," he meditated, aloud. "I can hang the bomb across my shoulder to keep it out of the wet."

The catamaran having been made thoroughly secure, he hastened away to the terrace. He missed Elaine. She was down at the "smelter,"

attending the fire that was roasting the new clay vessels.

With a bomb and his lighted torch in hand--held well apart and not for a moment handled carelessly--he hailed Elaine from the edge of the thicket by the wall.

"Just thought I'd drop around and drain out that water from the cave,"

he announced. "Everything's ready--and I've nothing else to do. When you hear the salute, you'll know it's a commonplace affair."

"Oh!" said Elaine, who had her doubts concerning his various explosions. "I'll watch to see you from the cliff."

"Well--er--I wouldn't stand just at the edge, you know--not till you know it's all over."

"You're not going to blow down the hill?"

"Hope not, I've taken a baby bomb, but I didn't wish to let it off till I'd told you what to expect. I'd keep away, in case of flying pieces."

"I will," said Elaine. "But I'll go up now, and perhaps you can call to let me know how well you have succeeded."

"I'll send you a wireless."

Grenville hastened to his raft. "Please G.o.d she may never have to hear me fire another!" he thought, as he went, reflecting on things that might happen. He could not have known that only a mild beginning had been made on their programme as scheduled by the Fates.

He was soon rowing eagerly and vigorously against the current of the tide, which would run with lessening velocity for perhaps another hour.

When he came to the cave, he promptly discovered why the injunction to enter its mouth at high water only had been made a point in the mystic directions found with the map in the tube.

The ledge whereon he had landed before was deeply undercut. During a tide no more than two or three feet lower than this that would serve him to-day, the place could scarcely be approached, and could never be entered at all. The swirl, which was rarely ever absent from the place, increased in violence steadily with the lowering levels of the water.

It was not without some chance of catastrophe that he presently landed on the shelf. He lost little time in securing his painter to the rocks, the line so adjusted he could readily slip it from the crevice should a hasty retreat seem wise.

The task of blasting out the ledge was not a simple matter. To lodge the bomb where its energy would be directed almost wholly against the dam, or rock, and yet protect it from the trickling stream that could readily render it useless, involved an extra toil of piling rocks, on which he had not reckoned.

Fortunately, much of the thickest wall was opposed to the pot-hole in the dam, while one or two extra-heavy fragments from the cliff were so lightly poised he could drop them in the breach. Despite these natural advantages, however, he labored hotly for fully half an hour before he could even lay his fuse.

Meantime, his torch was blazing smokily, against his final need of igniting the match and later exploring for results. At length he looped the fuse along a ragged line of broken honeycomb, where pits had been eaten in the tufa, and trailed it well down to the brink of the ledge, with its end propped high between two bowlders.

With one last look at all his careful arrangements, he slipped off his raft-line, caught up his torch, and was stepping down to board his float when a sharp piece of rock broke away beneath his foot and dropped him forward on his hand.

The torch was flung against the fuse, where it lay along the slope. He heard it hiss, where the powder had caught, and aware that, by three or four feet, it was shorter now than he had ever intended to light it, he lurched full-length upon his raft and fumbled to clutch up the oars.

But the swirl was on, and the catamaran seemed possessed to b.u.mp against the ledge.

In a final desperate outburst of strength, he sent the thing shooting outward. Its bow would have turned in the whirlpool then, but he drove it clear of the point.

Like a madman he pulled at the clumsy oars, to reach the protection where the wall all but folded the basin from the sea.

His raft was around it--half of the raft--and another good foot would have covered himself, when the blast abruptly boomed.

Even out of the tail of his eye he saw the dull-red flare behind a blot that represented ragged rock in motion.

A fragment no larger than a man's two fists came as straight as a cannon projectile and struck the pitted wall beside his head.

He had ducked instinctively forward, which doubtless saved his life.

But dozens of smaller and barely less violent fragments were broken away from the edge of the wall by the piece with the meteoric speed.

One of these struck him above the ear--and down he went, face forward, on the platform, to hang with arms and shoulders loosely supported on the bridge that was used for the sockets of his rowlocks.

A rain of loose pieces hissed about in the sea. The cave belched smoke like a suddenly active volcano. The tide took the raft, with its motionless burden, and floated it back whence the man had come, but not so close in the sh.o.r.e.

Then up on the cliff, when the shock and hail had subsided from all the air about her, Elaine came inquiringly over to the brink, to receive some word that all was well.

The smoke still rose from down below and obscured the face of the waters. There was nothing Elaine could discover. She waited a time that seemed very long, in her usual determination not to seem unduly alarmed or importunate concerning Sidney's safety.

But at last she called his name.

There was no response. Her uneasiness increased. She called again, and moved along the brink, staring eagerly down at the sea.

Then at last a sound like a stifled moan escaped her whitened lips.

She had seen that prostrate, helpless figure drifting down by the sh.o.r.e on his raft.

CHAPTER XXVIII

WHAT THE BLAST DISCOVERED

Grenville revived, with his characteristic pertinacity. An impulse to save himself was still alive in his brain. Actuated by its survival, he struggled galvanically to rise.

"Oh, please!" said a voice, that sounded remarkably familiar. "Please try to keep quiet for a little!"

Yet he had to sit up, with one hand to support him, if nothing more.

He was still on the raft, and there was Elaine, on her knees, pulling hard at his oars to drive the float ash.o.r.e. She was dripping wet from head to foot.

For a moment Grenville regarded her blankly, while the situation cleared in his brain.

"What ho, skipper!" he said, a bit faintly. "You didn't swim out to this contraption?"