“Take her,” I said, stepping aside.
The girl scowled at me, laughed.
“Very well, Ignati,” she said in English, “I shall go home,” and she turned on her heel and went back up the alley, the big man close behind her.
Glad to be alone, I wasted no time in moving in the opposite direction until the pebbles of the beach were under my feet. The pebbles ground harshly under my heels. I moved back to more silent ground and began to work my way as swiftly as I could up the shore toward the center of action.
The machine gun barked on. Smaller guns snapped. Three concussions, close together—bombs, hand grenades, my ears and my memory told me.
The stormy sky glared pink over a roof ahead of me and to the left. The boom of the blast beat my eardrums. Fragments I couldn’t see fell around me. That, I thought, would be the jeweler’s safe blowing apart.
I crept on up the shore line. The machine gun went silent. Lighter guns snapped, snapped, snapped. Another grenade went off. A man’s voice shrieked pure terror.
Risking the crunch of pebbles, I turned down to the water’s edge again. I had seen no dark shape on the water that could have been a boat. There had been boats moored along this beach in the afternoon. With my feet in the water of the bay I still saw no boat. The storm could have scattered them, but I didn’t think it had. The island’s western height shielded this shore. The wind was strong here, but not violent.
My feet sometimes on the edge of the pebbles, sometimes in the water, I went on up the shore line. Now I saw a boat. A gently bobbing black shape ahead. No light was on it. Nothing I could see moved on it. It was the only boat on that shore. That made it important.
Foot by foot, I approached.
A shadow moved between me and the dark rear of a building. I froze. The shadow, man-size, moved again, in the direction from which I was coming.
Waiting, I didn’t know how nearly invisible, or how plain, I might be against my background. I couldn’t risk giving myself away by trying to improve my position.
Twenty feet from me the shadow suddenly stopped.
I was seen. My gun was on the shadow.
“Come on,” I called softly. “Keep coming. Let’s see who you are.”
The shadow hesitated, left the shelter of the building, drew nearer. I couldn’t risk the flashlight. I made out dimly a handsome face, boyishly reckless, one cheek dark-stained.
“Oh, how d’you do?” the face’s owner said in a musical baritone voice. “You were at the reception this afternoon.”
“Yes.”
“Have you seen Princess Zhukovski? You know her?”
“She went home with Ignati ten minutes or so ago.”
“Excellent!” He wiped his stained cheek with a stained handkerchief, and turned to look at the boat. “That’s Hendrixson’s boat,” he whispered. “They’ve got it and they’ve cast the others off.”
“That would mean they are going to leave by water.”
“Yes,” he agreed, “unless—Shall we have a try at it?”
“You mean jump it?”
“Why not?” he asked. “There can’t be very many aboard. God knows there are enough of them ashore. You’re armed. I’ve a pistol.”
“We’ll size it up first,” I decided, “so we’ll know what we’re jumping.”
“That is wisdom,” he said, and led the way back to the shelter of the buildings.
Hugging the rear walls of the buildings, we stole toward the boat.
The boat grew clearer in the night. A craft perhaps forty-five feet long, its stern to the shore, rising and falling beside a small pier. Across the stern something protruded. Something I couldn’t quite make out. Leather soles scuffled now and then on the wooden deck. Presently a dark head and shoulders showed over the puzzling thing in the stern.
The Russian lad’s eyes were better than mine.
“Masked,” he breathed in my ear. “Something like a stocking over his head and face.”
The masked man was motionless where he stood. We were motionless where we stood.
“Could you hit him from here?” the lad asked.
“Maybe, but night and rain aren’t a good combination for sharpshooting. Our best bet is to sneak as close as we can, and start shooting when he spots us.”
“That is wisdom,” he agreed.
Discovery came with our first step forward. The man in the boat grunted. The lad at my side jumped forward. I recognized the thing in the boat’s stern just in time to throw out a leg and trip the young Russian. He tumbled down, all sprawled out on the pebbles. I dropped behind him.
The machine gun in the boat’s stern poured metal over our heads.
IV
“No good rushing that!” I said. “Roll out of it!”
I set the example by revolving toward the back of the building we had just left.
The man at the gun sprinkled the beach, but sprinkled it at random, his eyes no doubt spoiled for night-seeing by the flash of his gun.
Around the corner of the building, we sat up.
“You saved my life by tripping me,” the lad said coolly.
“Yes. I wonder if they’ve moved the machine gun from the street, or if—”
The answer to that came immediately. The machine gun in the street mingled its vicious voice with the drumming of the one in the boat.
“A pair of them!” I complained. “Know anything about the layout?”
“I don’t think there are more than ten or twelve of them,” he said, “although it is not easy to count in the dark. The few I have seen are completely masked—like the man in the boat. They seem to have disconnected the telephone and light lines first and then to have destroyed the bridge. We attacked them while they were looting the bank, but in front they had a machine gun mounted
