Conspiracy (England)/Chapter 10

was on the eleventh night after this that events began shaping swiftly.

Driven by hate of his captors, Wingate had put into effect an amazing stratagem. Day by day he had fought and conquered the gnawing pangs, but he had continued to buy and to destroy the drug. What matter if the expense was dizzying? Not otherwise could he carry out the plan his clearing brain had conceived.

There had been crises. Some few times Wingate had almost yielded—had thought death at hand; but rather that, now, than to lose his cherished plan of vengeance! In his shaken and emaciated body there still dwelt enough of the old-time stamina to keep his vital machinery going until nature could begin once more to build real strength.

He ate as heartily as he could, letting Jaccard and Zanelli infer that his appetite and his better appearance were resulting from his resumption of the morphine. After deprivation, the drug has this deceitful action of restoring a specious kind of health. As for his improved appearance, he concealed that as much as possible. When his captors came, he usually remained huddled on his tarpaulin, taking particular care not to let them see his eyes. Had they once noticed that the pupils had become normal again, they must have fathomed his secret.

By day, with the shades close drawn, and more especially by night, he had begun carefully graded exercise—not too much at first. His experience as an athlete had taught him how much he could endure; and gradually, bit by bit, he had increased the work. Life had returned, vitality began to flow back. It was too much to expect that any great degree of muscular strength could be so quickly built up; but at all events Wingate had gained nerve control. His body now obeyed him, and his inherent force, to some degree restored, gave promise that in what he was planning to do it would not desert him.

Yes, life had responded to his beckoning, and was coming back again!

One of the strange features of morphine addiction is the readiness of nature to reassert herself, when all the poison is withdrawn. Wingate was now experiencing this. He had worked himself toward health as a galley slave works—sweating, gasping, gaining where he could, fighting to hold every gain. God, what a battle!

Nothing that he could plan had been left undone. On the sixth day he had asked for paper, pen, and ink, saying that he wanted to amuse himself by writing letters. Jaccard had brought these things, with a sneer.

“Fine letters a dope fiend can write! Well, as they'll never be sent anywhere, I don't suppose there's any harm in it.”

It had been a struggle for Wingate to hold himself in leash, to keep from hurling himself on the captain and inflicting what damage he might, before that mighty fist should strike him down; but he had restrained himself. His vision fixed on larger issues, he had swallowed the taunt in silence, huddled there like a dog on his rough tarpaulin.

And now the time had come to strike!

Not only did Wingate feel his clarity of mind and strength of body equal to the task, but on this night a tempest of wind and rain, sweeping the island, favored his enterprise. Another such storm might not come for many weeks, blinding the world with darkness, keeping the guards close in their bungalow.

How could they think that their victim, pent behind iron bars, and—as they believed—gripped by the talons of morphine, would try so perilous a conclusion with them as to attempt escape?

Wingate laughed to himself as he made his final preparations. Rough-bearded, still gaunt and haggard, but feeling his blood once more flow clean through his unpoisoned veins, he girt himself for the supreme effort.

His first move, well on toward midnight, was to pour out all but about two quarts of water from his bucket. He worked without a light, of course, lamps not being allowed him; but now and then an eerie flicker of lightning through the wind-flapped shades served to orient him. Into the remaining water he poured the contents of his ink bottle. He took his white flannel coat and jammed it down into the bucket. He stripped off his white trousers and did the same with them. He stirred the clothes around and around, working them well with his hands.

In a few minutes the garments had taken up all the inky water, and had become, if not black, at least somber-hued. A very essential point, this, in a night escape.

He put the wet clothes on again, pocketed all the cash and securities he still had left, and, folding the photograph, carefully slipped that into his inside breast pocket. Then he proceeded with his next step.

This was to pull back the fiber rug in the smaller room of the bungalow, and to finish taking up three boards there. For some nights he had been working at this task, and now it was almost done.

Lacking any tools, he had not tried to attack the iron window bars. He had concentrated his attention on the floor. First he had carefully located the position of two contiguous beams, as shown by rows of nail heads. Then he had set himself to cutting three of the boards, close inside these rows of nails.

With what, pray, had he worked? With the only thing that remained to him—the steel tongue of his belt buckle.

The boards were of pine. For many hours, night after night, he had patiently dug away the soft wood with the sharp metal tongue. He had gouged it, bit by bit, in two lines. Fighting weakness, sweating, struggling on and on, he had so persevered that now, in less than an hour, the final fibers of wood were picked away.

Using the tongue as a tiny lever, he was able to prize up one of the boards. A few minutes later the other two were free. An aperture measuring about eighteen by twenty-four inches remained before him. Through this, as the occasional lightning splashed the night sky, a pale luminescence gleamed.

“Now, then,” thought Wingate, carefully reviewing everything in his mind, “I think the entertainment is about ready to commence!”

Grimly he smiled, as he sat resting for a moment.

His next move was to put on his belt again and draw it tight. Then, taking one of the boards as the best he could do for a weapon, he swung his feet through the opening and slid down to the dry sand, about a yard below—the bungalow, like all such in the South, being set up on posts for the sake of coolness.

Once under the bungalow, he lay still for a few minutes, listening. Save for the steady drumming of rain on the house and on the palmetto fronds, and the roar of the surf as the west wind drove it up the beach, he heard nothing. An occasional dart of lightning revealed no sign of a guard.

“The captain and Zanelli would be bigger fools than I think them,” Wingate pondered, “if they stirred out of their own bungalow on a night like this!”

His heart leaped with joyous anticipations. He forgot weakness and exhaustion, nerved to any effort by the task that he had set himself.

All seeming clear, he crawled on hands and knees, reached the edge of the bungalow, and crept out into the storm. A furious dash of driven rain assailed him; the wind tugged and bolstered at him; but he gave no heed. With the piece of board gripped in his right hand, he made way on all fours toward the edge of the palmetto thicket, taking care to keep his bungalow between him and that of his jailers.

His unnaturally dilated pupils now stood him in good stead. Even in the darkest gloom he could make out dim outlines of things, and the intermittent lightning flashes revealed clearing and jungle in every minutest detail. So far as he could make out, not a living thing was in view.

Now he had reached the edge of the thickets. No telling what might lurk there—one of his guards, a poisonous reptile—unknown perils might be awaiting him.

“No matter!” he exulted. “I'm free, so far; and anything is better than that hellish slavery!”

He even found it in his straining heart to laugh at the thought of what Jaccard and Zanelli would say when they discovered the hole in the bungalow floor.

Now he was in the thickets. He stood up, peered cautiously, and advanced. There came a more vivid, nearer splinter of white lightning, followed by a tearing crash. It revealed every leaf and frond, blown, twisted as in torment. It flashed on raindrops that seemed miraculously arrested in mid-air. It showed spun streamers and veils of tormented water. Wingate laughed again, and thrust deeper into the whipping tangle, toward the beach.

Every minute he expected to hear a shout, perhaps the crack of a gun; but no—nothing came. In a few minutes he had won through the jungle. Bareheaded, drenched with rain that guttered down his body and dyed it with diluted ink, he came to the surf-assaulted sands.

He was a strange figure, staring-eyed, with ragged beard, and with clothes glued to his panting body—a wild, unreal figure, more like some shipwrecked pirate of romance than a New York financier. Life sometimes plays odd jests like these.

Now, on the beach, he could make out the yacht at anchor. She had swung around, her bow toward the west, her stern toward the shore, and was riding easily with no lights aboard. Wingate plowed along the sands and came to the little cedar dinghy drawn up almost to the edge of the dunes. He nodded with satisfaction.

“Now for job number two!” said he.

It taxed his strength to drag the dinghy down into the surf and launch it, to row along the northern side of the cove and around the point there. Had anybody been on watch, Wingate must inevitably have been discovered by the increasing flashes of lightning; but fortune favored him. He rounded the point in the now half swamped dinghy, drove her ashore again, and rolled her bottom up.

With a driftwood club—much more serviceable than his board, which he now discarded—he set himself to put the dinghy permanently out of commission. She was only a little twelve-foot craft, lightly built and finished, with her strakes copper-riveted. The sound of his blows, masked by rain and thunder, could not possibly carry far.

In less than a quarter of an hour he had thoroughly wrecked her, smashing her up beyond any possibility of repair. The leaping surf carried away the broken strakes and strewed them along the sands, for here the wind struck diagonally to the shore.

“There, that's that!” exclaimed Wingate, panting, sweating, but exultant.

He broke the oars over an old ship's timber lying bedded in the sand, and flung the pieces into the surf. His heart leaped with exultation. He laughed as he had not laughed in years.

His next move was to locate the tender.

There was just one sure way of finding it, and that was to make the circuit of the island. It would have been a severe enough task even by daylight, and in calm weather. By night, and with a half hurricane tearing at sea and island, it might have appalled the bravest; but Wingate was braver than the bravest now—not through any excess of natural courage, but through excess of hate, through—

Resting only a few minutes, he set off along the beach. Wind and weather tore at him. He bowed his head and pushed forward, leaning against the weight of the storm.

Ghostly, the huge white rollers pitched and tumbled far up the sands, sucking back with a clamor of falling waters. More than a mile he walked, into coves and out, around points, ever hoping by the intermittent play of lightning to get some glimpse of the tender, but in vain.

Finally the beach softened, narrowed, and grew muddy. Wingate found his way impeded by a marshy, black lagoon. He paused, drenched with rain and driven spray, the taste of salt on his lips, panting with the unusual exertion, yet still aflame with the passion of revenge.

Vaguely he could make out tangles of mangrove ahead. What perils might not exist there, from alligator, cottonmouth, unknown reptile? Little cared he!

“Hell, I'd rather die fighting, than be rounded up, dragged back to jail, and die there like a trapped rat!”

He pushed on into the swampy lagoon. A nightmare place it was, fetid, cozy, oversprawled with slimy mangroves that stood up from the water like monstrous and grotesque spiders, like huge, distorted crabs. He could make only a few feet at a time; then, clinging to the mangroves, he had to stop and rest. Bottomless sloughs seemed dragging him down. Only by holding fast to the mangrove branches could he keep from being engulfed.

The place became a horrid dream, stinking and black and deadly, like some Dantean forest of the inferno. Still he battled on and on.

He knew not how far this swamp might extend. It might reach away to the end of the island, and around it to the other shore. Inland he could not penetrate. Turn back he would not. Nothing remained but to labor on, thrashing, falling, clutching, dragging himself by inches through the sucking clutch of it.

How long this torment lasted, how could he tell? He knew only that after an eternity the swamp shallowed, and that he found firmer bottom. Then, bit by bit, the mangroves thinned. Patches of sand beach began to glimmer; and presently he was once more on clean, firm, white footing.

He skirted another cove, pushed around another point, where the palms were streaming like dryads' hair in the gale; and all at once—as a pale blaze of sheet lightning for one instant blotted out the dark—stopped with a cry of exultation:

“There, by God! There it is!”

Wingate had discovered the tender.

It was lying in a tiny cove, made fast to an extemporized wharf of palmetto logs. Doubtless some path, known only to his captors, led from this wharf to the bungalows, through the forest. Their purpose in keeping the boat and the two seamen there might have been to insure that a patrol would always be ready, in case Wingate should by any possibility escape from the isand—a patrol that he could not reach or influence. Again, it might have been to maintain a means of making their own getaway, were any outside interference to take place. No matter! The important fact was that Wingate had found it.

Thrilled with exultation, the fugitive none: the less took a little time before his next step. He needed to rest, to recruit his strength.

He sat down on the beach, club in hand, with rain and wind slashing at him, and pondered. The feel of the package of money and securities, and of the photograph in his breast pocket, encouraged and strengthened him. His thoughts reverted to the photograph, and he smiled.

After a time he got up again and advanced to the attack. The storm was passing over now, and the clouds thinning. Off to eastward the faintest possible blur of light was making itself visible. Wingate's dilated eyes could see at least enough outlines of things to guide him.

With his club fast gripped, he silently reached the little wharf and clambered aboard the tender. Without hesitation he banged lustily with the club on the door of the little cuddy, shouting:

“Hello, in there! Tumble out, lively!”

No answer.

“Come, get a move on!” vociferated Wingate, making his voice and words as rough as possible.

For a moment, dread possessed him. Perhaps the two seamen were not aboard. Perhaps they had been withdrawn and were even now on the yacht. In that case, his whole plan might miscarry. The fewer men he had to deal with on the Voyageur the greater his chances of success.

But now hope flamed up again. The seamen were here, for a grumbling became audible within the cuddy. A thick voice with a Swedish accent—the voice of a sailor whom Wingate knew as Aalborg—sleepily demanded:

“Who's that? What's wanted?”

“Come on, my hearties! Tumble out! There's trouble at the camp!”

A match rasped, and a feeble light trembled in the cuddy. Wingate could see the shine of it, in a thin line around the cuddy door. Another voice began to rumble, yawningly, with an oath or two.

“Well, are you coming?” shouted Wingate. “Shake a leg, I say!”