Mother Bevan hovering in the middle distance. I had a good appetite for my meals: in fact, the food set before me at my abode would have awakened the most finicky dyspeptic to zest and relish, even to voracity; while the dinners to which I was invited were delectable.
But from night to night I slept less and less, until I was near insomnia. And, from day to day, I found it more and more difficult to absorb myself in reading, to keep my mind on what I read; even to read at all.
Again I waylaid Radnor. I described to him my progressively worsening discomfort and distress.
“I am now,” I said, “or soon shall be, not merely in need of your help, but beyond any help from you or anybody. If you don't do something for me I'll go crazy, I'll do something desperate, I'll commit suicide.”
“I have been pondering,” he said, “how to help you, and I have almost bit upon a method. Your condition does not yet justify my giving you anything to make you sleep. As yet I do not want to give you any sort of drug, not even the simplest sedative. Honestly try to get to sleep to-night. Before tomorrow I think I'll hit upon an entirely suitable prescription salutary for you and yet avoiding any appearance any hint, of my antagonizing Pembroke.”
I did try to sleep that night, but I was still wide awake long after midnight. So tossing and turning on my comfortable bed, I heard outside in the moonless darkness some one whistling a tune. As the sound came nearer I made sure it was Radnor. Also I recognized the tune.
It was that of “The Ballad of Nell Flaherty's Drake.”
The tune brought to my mind the words of the song's refrain:
“The dear little fellow,
“His legs were so yellow,
“He could fly like a swallow and swim like a hake!
“Bad luck to the tober,
“The haythen cashlober,
“The monsther thot murthered Nell Flaherty's drake!”
All of a sudden I conceived that this was Radnor's method of intimating to me by indirection what he did not dare to utter to me in plain words. thought I knew what he meant as well as if it had been put into the plainest words. I rolled over, was asleep in three breaths, and slept till Fong ventured to waken me.
After breakfast I went upstairs again and rummaged about in the closet where Fong had deposited what I had worn when I came under his care. I found there everything I remembered to have had about me. My automatic was well oiled and in good working order and its clip of cartridges was full. My belt, with the extra clips of cartridges, was as it had been when I last put it on. I put it on, over my feather-weight hot-weather habiliments; I strapped on my automatic; I strolled out, intent on somehow coming within speaking distance of Pembroke.
Chance, or some unconscious whim, guided my footsteps to the beach and, in spite of the rapidly intensifying heat of the sun rays, along it to the remaining fragments of my wreck, barely visible under a great accumulation of beach foam, left by the breakers, hurled shorewards during the thunder storm which had raged while I slept.
Not far beyond those vestiges of what had been an aeroplane, approaching me along the beach, I encountered Pembroke.
I found I had now no difficulty in speaking out my mind.
“Pembroke,” I said, “I'm outdone with confinement on this island of yours. I'm irritated past endurance. If you don't promptly speed me on my way elsewhere the tension inside me is going to get too much for me. Something inside me is going to snap and I'll do something desperate, something you'll regret.”
He looked me straight in the eyes, handsome in his fantastic toggery; calm and cool, to all appearance.
“Are you, by any chance,” he drawled, “threatening to shoot me?”
“I haven't made any threats,” I retorted, hotly, “and I have no intentions of shooting you or anybody. I realize that this island of yours is part of the British Empire and that in no part of it are homicides or murderous assaults condoned or left unpunished. But, since you use the word 'threat,' I am ready to make a threat. If you don't soon set me free of my present captivity, if you don't soon put me in the way of getting home, I'll not shoot you or any human being, but I will shoot that devilish gander; and, I promise you, if I shoot at him I'll hit him and if I hit him I'll kill him. I fancy those are plain words and I conjecture that you understand me fully, with all the implications of what I say.”
Pembroke's expression of face appeared to me to indicate not only amazement and surprise, but the emotions of a man at a loss and momentarily helpless in the face of wholly unexpected circumstances.
“You come with me!” he snapped.
I followed him along the beach to the village, and, as we went, wondered to see him apparently comfortable in his tight-fitting suit and bare headed beneath the fierce radiance of the merciless sun rays, while I rejoiced in my flimsy garments and at being sheltered under the very adequate Panama I had chosen from the beadgear Fong had offered me.
We passed the end of the steel picket fence, the two beach guards saluting Pembroke, and, I thought, suppressing a tendency to grin at me. Just around the point was a wide aviation field with a long row of hangars opposite the beach. I marveled, for I had caught no glimpse of any avion in the air over or about the island.
A half dozen Asiatics, apparently Annamites, rose as we approached and stood respectfully, eyes on Pembroke. He uttered some sort of order in a tongue unknown to me and two of them set wide open the doors of one of the hangars. In it, to my amazement, I saw a Visconti biplane, one of the fastest and most powerful single- seaters ever built.
“What do you think of that?” Pembroke queried.
“I am astonished,” I answered. “I was certain that no specimen of this type of machine had ever been on this side of the Atlantic.”
“This is the first and only Visconti to be set up on this side of the ocean,” he replied. “The point is; could you fly it?”
“I think I could,” I said, “and I am sure I could try.”
“Try then,” Pembroke snapped. “I make you a present of it. The sooner you're off and away the better I'll be pleased.”
He spoke at some length, apparently in the same unknown tongue, and strode off towards his palace.
I spent that day and most of the next going over that Visconti biplane, with the deft, quick assistance of the docile Annamites. If there was anything about it defective, untrustworthy or out of order I could not find it. On the third morning (I had dined at Radnor's both evenings), equipped admirably by Fong, who instantly provided me with whatever I asked for, I rose in that Visconti biplane, and, contrary to my fears, reached Miami in safety. But I was so overstrained by anxiety that it required six weeks in a sanitarium to make me myself again. During those, apparently, endless hours in the air I had been expecting every moment that something cunningly arranged beforehand and undiscoverable to my scrutiny in my inspections and reinspections, was going to go wrong with my conveyance and instantaneously annihilate me. The strain all but finished me. However, all's well that ends well.
