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She had given so many proofs of her natural courage that it must be equal to even so affrighting a test as the near presence of the Alaculof Indians. But he broke in on the Spaniard's recital with a question of direct interest. "Ask him, Christobal, why he said those devils would come again by daylight." "Because they have guns, and can use them," was the appalling answer given by Suarez.
Owing to loss of consciousness, supplemented by an awkward fall, he might have choked to death had he not been rescued within a few minutes. He was very ill all night, and it was not until midday that he recovered sufficient strength to enable him to question the Indians on board. Courtenay wished specially to find out what chance, if any, there was of the Alaculof attack being renewed.
Elsie and Gray became aware that Suarez was cautiously drawing himself inboard again. Then his paddle dipped with a noiseless stroke; the canoe was inside the Alaculof harbor. The midnight blackness was now something that had a sense of actual obstruction in it. It seemed that a hand put forth would encounter a wall. The tide was here, but no perceptible current.
He had no notion that she would give his words a more direct significance than he intended them to bear. But a strange, hoarse yell of triumph, the war-cry of an Alaculof leader who had hauled himself to the bridge and found it undefended, warned her in the same moment that all was not well with the defense. She sprang towards the saloon stairs. "Do you hear that?" she cried in a ringing voice.
I suppose Suarez told you what to expect?" "You might as well be talking Alaculof yourself for all I can follow what you are saying," murmured Elsie happily. "Then how did you know where to tie up? We went too far. We lost the boat that way, and my gun as well. We had to jump for it, and it was only the boat's stout timbers which enabled her to live through that boiling pot in the volcano.
He disliked these references to the Alaculof bogy in Elsie's presence. It was enough that it should exist without being constantly paraded. Though the girl herself was the culprit, Tollemache should have left the topic alone. But Tollemache was a man of fixed ideas.
He laughed quietly, but his mirth had a curious ring in it which boded ill for certain unknown members of the Alaculof tribe when the threatened tussle came to close quarters. Elsie heard him. Leaning over the rails of the spar deck, she asked cheerfully: "What is the joke, Captain Courtenay? And why don't the Indians come nearer? Are they timid? They don't look it." He glanced up at her.
Christobal would have aired such a scrap of interesting knowledge at the foot of the scaffold, and expected the executioner to listen attentively. "They are called the Alaculof. They use bows and arrows, with heads chipped out of stone or bottle-glass," put in Tollemache.
A wonderful power seemed to flow through her body, like a gush of strong wine. She was assured that she, unaided, could beat down all the puny, despicable creatures who barred the path to her lover. She vaulted over the writhing form of the Alaculof, and made to climb the stairs, but Christobal, admirably cool, fired again and brought another Indian to his knees.
As he used the Alaculof language, the sounds he uttered were the most extraordinary that Courtenay had ever heard from a human throat a compound of hoarse, guttural vowels, and consonants ending in a series of clicks and the stentorian power of his lungs must have amazed the Indians. Courtenay saw that the two fleets were combining forces about five hundred yards to westward.
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