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We'll keep it close enough, lads, and Captain Nepeen will learn it soon enough. Do you whistle, Dolly, and get an answer. I hope to God it is all well with them still." He whistled across the sea, and after a long minute of waiting a distant voice cried, "All's well!" For the hour at least our comrades were safe. Should we say the same of them when daylight came?
To Captain James Nepeen a tight corner was a pleasure-ground; and now with these yelling devils all round him, and the vapour steaming in the woods behind, and the sea shimmering like a haven that would beckon us to salvation, he could yet wear that cynical smile of his, and go with lighter step, and bear himself like the true seaman that he was.
Now I know that it is true. My fellow-passengers are there, dead or dying, and at sundown I am certainly going ashore to do what I can for them." "You are a brave man, Captain Nepeen," said I, "a very brave man. Where you go I follow. We cannot leave poor seamen to perish, cost us what it may.
But little by little the sounds died away, echoing in other and distant galleries, or coming to us as whispered voices, speaking from places remote, and leaving to us at last a silence utter and profound. We were masters of the bout and the engine was ours. "Captain Nepeen," said I, "do you and three others go back to the stairs-head and hold it until I come.
There were four with me in the boat, and Captain Nepeen was one of them. I had set Peter Bligh at the tiller, and Seth Barker and an American seaman to pull the oars. We spoke rare words, for even a whisper would carry across that night-bound sea. There were rifles in our hands; good hope at our hearts.
"Doctor," I said at last, "if we are not at the bottom of it now, we never shall be. But we are men, and we will act as men should. Let the women stand together in the great hall until the sea drives them out. If water is our need, I am ashore to Ken's Island to-morrow to get it. As for Nepeen, we have a boat and we have hands to man it; we'll fetch Captain Nepeen, doctor," said I.
Such fish we counted, hundreds of them, at the windows of the second cavern we entered; and, drawing back from it affrighted, we went on like men who fear to speak of that which they have seen. "A madman's house; it could not be anything else," says Captain Nepeen, as pale as any ghost; "unless I had seen it with my own eyes, Mr. Begg, no story that ever was written would make me believe it.
They heard me to the end; but ignorant, perhaps, of my meaning they continued to whine, "Water, water," and when I must repeat that we had no water, one of them, leaping up in the boat, fired his rifle point-blank at Captain Nepeen, who fell without a word stone-dead at my side. "Great God!" said I, "they've shot the captain dead."
Doctor Gray stood behind the old Frenchman, and, limping up to my side, he leaned against the rock and began to speak of it very coolly. "The water is in," he said, "but it will not flood the higher rooms, for they are above sea-level. We are saving what provisions we can, and the men below are all right. As for Nepeen, we must get him off in a boat somehow.
We'll put them in the engine room, where they'll keep the fires going for their own sakes. If they so much as look false, then shoot them down. It is in my mind, Captain Nepeen," said I, "that we'll have need of such a man as you, and three good fellows with you, at the lesser gate.
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