Page:Weird Tales volume 32 number 05.djvu/26

536 even as I stood there, from the door of a near-by stateroom two figures crept softly toward me—one shaggy and terrible. The splashing waves and rumbling engines, together with the dim yells, drowned their almost noiseless approach, but nothing short of death itself could have kept them from their purpose.

They were but a step behind me when one trod softly to the left. His right arm motioned to my legs, while the awful thing he commanded sprang forward to obey. Even as that vise-like grip snapped around my ankles there came again the terrible odor, like that of some wild animal's cage gone uncleaned for weeks—but too late as a warning. Though I wheeled in a flash, those great muscles had surged forward, and even as I grasped for some support, I was pitched over the small rail into the Atlantic.

Behind me the wail of a wild beast rose in a triumphant howl to the stars!

on the broad Atlantic a figure shot through the starlight, a hurtling silent body that apparently could be added as another of the long list of victims who had dared oppose Manuel De Costa.

It seemed an eternity before I struck a rising wave and felt the waters close over my head, and then another lifetime till I emerged to the surface, gasping for the life-giving air. The swift plunge into the sea had cleared any haziness caused by the fall, so that now, other than a slight bleeding around my ankles where the sharp claws of the shaggy one had torn the flesh, it might have been as though the accident had never happened—physically.

It was a small compensation for my present predicament, however, and I knew well whom to thank for it. Perhaps at this very moment Manuel De Costa was searching my stateroom, or had already come upon the scroll secreted in my luggage. My thoughts flashed to The Midnight Lady. Come what may, the Spaniard had beaten us, as we would have no means of guidance to the tomb even if I were able to reach shore.

For a long while I lay in the sea, just supporting myself with a gentle movement of my hands, and watching the receding lights of the steamer as they retreated ever farther into the blackness of the south, to disappear finally in a golden twinkle. A cool night wind whistled above the waves.

There was, I realized, a possible one chance in twenty thousand of my being picked up, and less that I would reach shore.

That lone hope lay in the east, toward which I was now swimming. In all probability the ship had been miles from the coast, but there was the remote chance that it had kept near the shoreline. On that slight hope my fate rested.

For a long half-hour I swam steadily ahead. It was now that I was thankful for the years of athletic training that made it possible for my hardened muscles to cope with the waves. With any kind of luck I should be able to keep afloat for hours.

The first streaks of gray were whitening the skies when a black mass, rising and falling in the waves to the right, attracted my attention. A few strokes brought me to it—a raft-like mass of wreckage beside which floated an overturned life-boat. How it had got there, or where it had come from, I did not stop to reason, but an instant