reepers that
no human strength could serve to loosen. And all the time he drew her
with him, speaking softly.

Then she felt him pause, and her distracted vision beheld another figure
entering the shadows from the shore. She called to her lover hoarsely,
and saw him halt at the strange note, peering inward for a sight of her.
She voiced words now for the first time, crying:

"The stranger! The stranger!"

Then, hearing the scrape of her captor's machete as he drew it from its
scabbard, she renewed her struggle more fiercely.

Captain Inocencio held the girl at his left side until the last moment,
balancing the great knife-blade as if to try his arm; then, when the
Indian was close upon him, coming straight as a dart, he freed himself.
A slanting moonbeam showed Markeena's ferocious visage and his upraised
weapon, but the Haytian met the falling blow with a fierce upward stroke
that once before had done him service. It was the stroke that had made
him an exile years before.

Inocencio's physical strength had ever been his pride, if also his
undoing. Above all things, he prided himself upon the dexterity and
vigor of his wrist. His early training on that blood-red Caribbean isle,
and a later life in thicket and swamp, had served to transform the
cumbrous native weapon into a thing of life at his hands. More than
once, for instance, he had harried a serpent until it struck, for the
mere satisfaction of severing its head in midcourse, and now he felt the
wide blade enter flesh. Before his antagonist could cry out twice he had
slashed again, this time downward as if to split a green cocoanut. The
next instant he had seized the girl as she fled into the jungle.

But she had found her voice at last, and he was forced to muffle her
with his palm. When they were out into the moonlight, however, with the
dry sand up to their ankles, he let her breathe; then, pointing with his
machete to the _Espirita_ lying white and ghostlike in the offing, he
drove her down into the warm sea until it reached her waist.

"Swim!" he ordered, and, when she would have renewed the alarm, he
raised his blade, grimly threatening to call the sharks with her blood.

"Swim!" he repeated, and she struck out, with him at her shoulder.

But the village was roused. A confused clamor betrayed its bewilderment,
and before the swimmers had won more than half-way to the schooner,
figures came running along the shore. Inocencio cautioned the girl to
hol