He slipped forward along the port side and knelt beside her. She sat up. “We’re all set,” he said. “Nothing to do now until high tide.”
“That’ll be about dawn, won’t it?”
“Right around there.”
“Do you think we’ll make it then?”
“Yes,” he said quietly. “We’ll get off this time. But why don’t you go back to the cockpit and get some sleep? I’ll watch for Morrison.”
“You can’t watch both places at once.”
“Yes. I can sit here where I can keep a hand on this tackle holding the anchor warp. If he tries to climb it, I’ll feel the vibration.”
“I’d rather stay up and talk,” she said. “We can talk, can’t we?”
“Sure. As long as we keep a lookout.”
They slid aft until they were beside the cleat holding the tackle, and sat down on the sloping deck with their backs against the deckhouse in the velvet night overlaid with the shining dust of stars. There was no breath of air stirring, and no sound anywhere, and they seemed to be caught up and suspended in some vast and cosmic hush outside of time and lost in space. They sat shoulder to shoulder, unspeaking, with Ingram’s left hand resting lightly on the taut and motionless nylon leading aft, and when he put the other hand down on deck it was on hers and she turned hers slightly so they met and clasped together. After a long time she stirred and said in a small voice, “This is a great conversation, isn’t it? I hope I didn’t promise anything brilliant.” He turned and looked at the soft gleam of tawny hair and the pale shape of her face in the starlight and then she was in his arms and he was holding her hungrily and almost roughly as he kissed her. There was a wild and wonderful sweetness about it with her arms tight around his neck and the strange, miraculous breaching of the walls of loneliness behind which he had lived so long, and then she was pushing back with her hands against his shoulders.
“I think maybe we had better talk,” she said shakily.
“I expect you’re right,” he agreed. “But you’d better get started.”
“Two platoons of Morrisons in full pack and dragging a jeep could walk right over us and we wouldn’t even notice it.” She took a hurried breath, and went on. “And as to whether Morrison is the only hazard, I admit nothing. I plead the Fifth Amendment. But what do they do to these damn stars down here, anyway? Polish them? Now it’s your turn to say something, Ingram. You can’t expect me to carry on a conversation all by myself.”
“I think you’re magnificent,” he said. “Does that help?”
“Not a bit, and you know it. As a matter of fact, it can’t be much of a secret that I think you’re pretty wonderful yourself, but at least I told you so under perfectly ordinary, everyday circumstances, in bright sunlight with a man shooting at me with a rifle. I didn’t pull a sneaky trick like silhouetting my big square head against a bunch of cheap, flashy stars that anybody can see are phony. . . .” Her voice trailed off in a helpless gurgle of laughter, and she said, “Oh, I’m not making any sense. Why don’t I just shut up?”
When he raised his lips from hers she drew a finger tip along the side of his face and said softly, “You never have to hit Ingram twice with a cue. Not ol’ Cap Ingram. Do you think I’m pretty horrible?”
“Hmmm. No-o. That’s not the exact word I’d use.”
“I am, though. I’m as brazen as a Chinese gong and about as subtle as a mine cave-in. I’ve been sitting here for twenty minutes wondering when in Heaven’s name you were going to accept the fact you had to kiss me. All escape was cut off, and there was no honorable way to retreat.” He touched his lips gently to the puffed and battered eye. “Shut up,” he said.
“The only thing I didn’t realize was how fast it might start to get out of control. I should have, though. I worked so hard at trying to loathe you I was worn out to begin with. Did anybody ever tell you you’re a hard man to detest, Ingram? I mean, at a party or something, where there was one of those pauses in the conversation when everybody’s trying to think of something to say—”
She gasped as a bullet struck something above their heads and screamed off into the night. On the heels of it came the whiplash sound of the gun from somewhere directly behind them. They slid down and lay flat on deck against the side of the house. The rifle cracked three more times in rapid succession, two of the bullets striking the hull on the other side. She lay pressed against him; he could feel her trembling.
“I’m scared,” she whispered. “It’s gone on too long.”
“We’ll be away from here in the morning. And we’re perfectly safe down here.”
“You don’t think we ought to go back to the cockpit?”
“No. This is fine. We’ve got so much list now he couldn’t hit us if we were sitting up.” He was thinking of those boxes of ammunition suspended back there and wondering what would happen if they were hit. They probably wouldn’t explode, but some of the cartridges might fire. There were five evenly spaced shots then. Two of them struck the schooner’s hull.
“He’s nearer, isn’t he?” she asked.
“Yes. The tide’s gone out, so he’s waded out on the flat south of the sand spit.”
“How close can he get?”
“Not under a hundred and fifty yards. That channel is still over his head, even at dead low tide.” I wonder how he’s carrying the ammunition, he thought. Probably made a pack of some sort out of the blanket.
“How can he see to shoot in the dark?”
“He can’t, very well. You’ll notice he’s missing a lot. But he’s right down on the surface, firing at the silhouette, and he probably has something white on the muzzle of the rifle. Maybe a strip of his shirt.”
Another bullet struck the hull. Two apparently missed. Another hit. Subconsciously, he was counting. They would probably go through the planking from where he was firing now, and with the list the schooner had some of them would be below the water line, which was probably what Morrison had in mind. It wouldn’t matter, though, unless there were a great number of them; she had two bilge pumps, one power-driven, and could handle a lot of water.
“I’m tired of being shot at,” she said. “And sick to death of being so stinking brave about it. I want to have hysterics, like anybody else.”
He held her in his arms and spoke against her ear. “Go ahead.”
“It was mostly just blackmail. But keep talking there.”
“Do you know when it first dawned on me that I was probably crazy about you? It was when Ruiz came after you this morning, and I watched you wade out to the raft, torn pants, black eye—”
“Well, it figures, Ingram. Who could resist a vision like that?”
“No.” He groped for words to express what he had actually seen, the crazy honesty of her, the insouciance, the blithe and unquenchable spirit. “You were so—so damned undefeated.”
“Let’s don’t talk about me. I want to hear about you.”
The firing went on. They talked. He told her about Frances, and about the Canción, and Mexico, and the boatyard in San Juan. He mentioned the fire only briefly but she sensed there was more to it, and drew the rest of the story from him.
“That’s why you limp sometimes, isn’t it?” she asked quietly. “And what you were dreaming about when you were beating at the sand.”
“Yes,” he said.
“Ingram, I’m sorry.”
“It’s all right now.”