We beat slowly to the eastward. At noon I worked out another sight. We were already beyond the area Macaulay had thought he’d gone down in. I put our position on the chart twenty miles to the westward.
“Sometime this afternoon,” I told Barclay. “Or early tonight. Depends on the wind.”
He merely nodded. He was growing quieter now, colder than ever, and unapproachable. You could feel the tenseness in the air. We had to sight something, and soon.
The breeze kept threatening to die altogether, but held on, dead ahead. We tacked, and kept on tacking. When I wasn’t being watched I experimented to see how close to the wind I could sail her, and she was a dream, but I didn’t hold her there. I wanted to cover as much water on each side of our course as possible.
The afternoon wore on and sunset flamed, and we saw nothing. Barfield’s face was ugly as he watched her now, and several times I saw him glance questioningly at Barclay. We were all in the cockpit. I had the tiller.
“Listen,” I said harshly. “Both of you. Try to get it through your heads. We’re not looking for the corner of Third and Main. There are no street signs out here. We’re in the general area. But Macaulay could have been out ten miles in his reckoning. My figures could be from two to five miles out in any direction. Error adds up.”
He was listening, his face expressionless.
I went on. I had to make them see. “When Macaulay crashed, there was a heavy sea running. There’s not much now but a light ground swell. There could have been surf piled up that day high enough to see it five miles away, and now you might think it was just a tide rip. We’ve got to crisscross the whole area, back and forth. It may take two days, or even longer.”
Barclay studied me thoughtfully. “Don’t take too long.”
It was dusk. We came about and headed due north. Three hours later we came up into the wind and beat our way eastward again for an hour, and then ran south. Nobody said anything. We listened constantly for surf and strained our eyes into the darkness. The hours went by.
I was growing desperate. Our only chance lay in making them think we had found the place. Their vigilance would slacken a little. If we actually found a reef, any reef, and started dragging and diving I could ask for help. We had two aqualungs. If Barfield went over with me I could come back on some pretext and I’d have only Barclay to contend with. If she went over, I’d have her out of the way, so I could make a bid for one of those guns. Anything to get the four of us split up.
We ran south until after midnight, beat our way east a few miles, and swung back to the northward again. It went on all night. There was no sound of surf, no white relieving the darkness of the horizon. Dawn came. The sea was empty and blue as far as the eye could see.
The breeze died completely and we lay becalmed, the sails slatting. We lowered them.
“Start the auxiliary,” Barclay said.
“We’ll need the gasoline to drag with,” I protested, “when we find the reef.”
“Might I point out that we don’t appear to have found any reef,” he said icily. “Start the engine.”
I started it. The sun came up. We went on. The strain was bad now. You could feel it there in the cockpit.
Barclay took the glasses and stood up, scanning the horizon all the way around. Then he said, “Perhaps you’d better make some coffee, George.”
Barfield grunted and went below. In a few minutes Barclay followed him. I could hear the low sound of their voices in the cabin. She sat across from me in the cockpit, her face stamped with weariness. When she saw me looking at her, she tried to. smile.
The voices in the cabin stopped. I slipped a lashing on the tiller and stood up, easing my way softly to the forward end of the cockpit. I could see them below me, inside the cabin. Time had run out on us at last.
Barfield had taken a coil of line from under one of the settees and was cutting a section from it with his pocket-knife. He cut off another, shorter piece. I saw Barclay hand him one of the guns.
Oddly, it wasn’t fear I felt now that it was actually here. It was rage—a strange, hopeless, terrible sort of anger I’d never felt before. I turned and looked at her, thinking how it could have been if they had just left us alone. She was all I’d wanted since the first time I’d seen her. I hadn’t asked for anything else, and she hadn’t asked for anything except a chance to live, and now they were going to take it all away from us. I was shaking.
I turned and hurried back to her. “Go forward,” I said. “Lie down on deck, against the forward side of the cabin. Stay there. If anything happens to me, you can raise the jib alone. Just the jib. Keep running before the wind in a straight line and you’ll hit the coast of Mexico or Texas—”
“No,” she whispered fiercely. “No—”
I peeled her arms loose and pushed her. “Hurry!” She started to say something more, looked at my face, and turned, running forward. She stepped up from the cockpit and went along the starboard side of the cabin, stumbling once and almost falling.
It was like a black wind blowing. I knew I didn’t have a chance, but all I wanted now was to get my hands on one of those guns for just two seconds. Maybe she could make it to land alone. They’d kill me, anyway, so I had nothing to lose. I was tired of being run over in traffic.
I had to hurry. They’d be coming up any minute. I slipped forward and stood on the deck, looking down the hatch.
“Surf!” I yelled. “Surf, ho!”
When they were both on the steps I’d dive down on top of them. All three of us would go down in one tangle in that narrow space between the settees, three of us with two guns in an area not quite as wide and a little longer than a casket. Then, in all the foaming craziness some detached part of my mind wondered quite calmly how a girl alone would ever get us out of there. She’d be a week reaching land, maybe ten days. She’d go mad. They were starting up. Barclay was coming first. I didn’t dive.
“Surf!” I yelled again. I pointed.
He came up on deck, his head starting to turn in the direction I was pointing. I swung. It kept on turning, and I felt his jaw break, and then his whole body pivoted and went off balance and the sloop rolled to starboard and he went over the side. I was falling, too, across the open hatch, across the head and shoulders of Barfield emerging from the hatch, like dropping across the arms of a rising grease rack or the top of an ascending freight elevator that didn’t stop or even slow down at the impact but just kept on coming up.
He was a bull. He came erect on the top step before he toppled at last and fell. We crashed to the deck and when the sloop rolled down to port we hung poised over the rail with blue water slipping by just under my face. For some reason we didn’t go overboard, but rolled in one straining tangle onto the cockpit seat and then down onto the grating. A big fist beat at my face. I tried to get my hands around his throat. He heaved upward and we rolled over in the space between the seats. The gun was in his hip pocket. He had it out and was swinging it at my face. I caught his wrist. The gun went off as I got my other hand on his wrist and twisted. It slid out of his hand and kicked along the grating.
He hit me on the temple and my head slammed back against the planks. He was coming to his knees, groping behind him for the gun. I tried to push myself up, and then beyond him I saw her. She ran along the deck and dropped into the cockpit. I opened my mouth to yell at her, but nothing came out. Or maybe I did yell and my eardrums were still paralyzed by the crashing of the gun. Everything was happening in an immense silence and slow motion, as if we were three bits of something caught and held suspended in cooling gelatin. She picked up the gun and was swinging it at his head. He should have fallen, but it had no more effect on him than a dropped chocolate Eclair. He heaved upward, lashing out behind him with one big arm. She fell, and her head struck the coaming at the forward end of the cockpit. I came to my feet and lunged at him and we fell over and beyond her onto the edge of the deck just as the sloop rolled again and we slid over the side into the water.