leaped from the vessel's
deck as the soldiers seized their rifles and fired point-blank at these
mysterious assailants who spoke in a foreign language. But flame alone
could not stop that desperate attack. Some fell, but the survivors
sprang at the Brazilians like famished wolves on their prey. There was
no more shooting. Men grappled and fell, some into the water, others
on deck, or they sprawled over the hatch and wrought in frantic
struggle in the narrow cabin. The fight did not last many seconds. An
engineer, finding a lever and throttle valve, roared to a sailor to
take the wheel, and already the launch was curving seaward when Hozier
shouted:

"Where is Marcel?"

"Lyin' dead on the wharf," said Watts.

"Are you certain?"

"He was alongside me, an' 'e threw is 'ands up, an' dropped like a shot
rabbit."

"Then who has gone for Miss Yorke?"

"No one. D'ye think that this d--d President cares for anybody but
hisself?"

Philip felt the deck throbbing with the pulsations of the screw. The
lights on shore were gliding by. The launch was leaving Fernando
Noronha, and Iris was waiting in that wretched hut beyond the hill,
waiting for the summons that would not reach her, for Marcel was dead,
and Domingo, the one other man who could have gone to her, was lying in
the cabin with three ribs broken and a collar-bone fractured.

CHAPTER IX

WHEREIN CERTAIN PEOPLE MEET UNEXPECTEDLY

Iris came back from the void to find herself lying on a truckle bed in
a dimly-lighted hovel. A cotton wick flickered in a small lamp of the
old Roman type. It was consuming a crude variety of castor oil, and
its gamboge-colored flame clothed the smoke-darkened rafters and mud
walls in somber yet vivid tints that would have gladdened the heart of
a Rubens. This scenic effect, admirable to an artist, was lost on a
girl waking in affright and startled by unfamiliar surroundings. She
gazed up with uncomprehending eyes at two brown-skinned women bending
over her.

One, the elder, was chafing her hands; the other, a tall, graceful
girl, was stirring something in an earthenware vessel. She heard the
girl murmur joyfully:

"Gracas a Deus, elh' abria lhes olhas!"

Iris was still wandering in that strange borderland guarded by unknown
forces that lies between conscious life and the sleep that is so close
of kin to death. If in full possession of her senses, she might not
have caught the drift of the sentence, since it