Our boat grounded beside it. We jumped, splashed, ashore–Cotton ahead, the others spread out behind him.
As suddenly as if he had sprung out of the air, Harvey Whidden appeared in the far end of the v, standing in the sand, a rifle in his hands. Anger and utter astonishment were mixed in his heavy face, and in his voice when he yelled:
“You God-damned double-crossing–” The noise his rifle made blotted out the rest of his words.
Cotton had thrown himself down sideways. The rifle bullet missed him by inches, sang between Fitzstephan and me, nicking his hat-brim, and splattered on the rocks behind. Four of our guns went off together, some more than once.
Whidden went over backwards, his feet flying in the air. He was dead when we got to him–three bullets in his chest, one in his head.
We found Gabrielle Collinson cowering back in the corner of a narrow-mouthed hole in the rock wall–a long triangular cave whose mouth had been hidden from our view by the slant at which it was set. There were blankets in there, spread over a pile of dried seaweed, some canned goods, a lantern, and another rifle.
The girl’s small face was flushed and feverish, and her voice was hoarse: she had a cold in her chest. She was too frightened at first to tell us anything coherent, and apparently recognized neither Fitzstephan nor me.
The boat we had come in was out of commission. Whidden’s boat couldn’t be trusted to carry more than three with safety through the surf. Tim and Rolly set off for Quesada in it, to get us a larger vessel. It was an hour-and-a-half’s round trip. While they were gone we worked on the girl, soothing her, assuring her that she was among friends, that there was nothing to be afraid of now. Her eyes gradually became less scary, her breathing easier, and her nails less tightly pressed into her palms. At the end of an hour she was answering our questions.
She said she knew nothing of Whidden’s attempt to kidnap her Thursday night, nothing of the telegram Eric had sent me. She sat up all Friday night waiting for him to return from his walk, and at daylight, frantic at his failure to return, had gone to look for him. She found him–as I had. Then she went back to the house and tried to commit suicide–to put an end to the curse by shooting herself.
“I tried twice,” she whispered; “but I couldn’t. I couldn’t. I was too much a coward. I couldn’t keep the pistol pointing at myself while I did it. I tried the first time to shoot myself in the temple, and then in the breast; but I hadn’t the courage. Each time I jerked it away just before I fired. And after the second time I couldn’t even get courage to try again.”
She changed her clothes then–evening clothes, now muddy and torn from her search–and drove away from the house. She didn’t say where she had intended going. She didn’t seem to know. Probably she hadn’t had any destination–was simply going away from the place where the curse had settled on her husband.
She hadn’t driven far when she had seen a machine coming towards her, driven by the man who had brought her here. He had turned his car across the road in front of her, blocking the road. Trying to avoid hitting his car, she had run into a tree–and hadn’t known anything else until she had awakened in the cave. She had been here since then. The man had left her here alone most of the time. She had neither strength nor courage to escape by swimming, and there was no other way out.
The man had told her nothing, had asked her nothing, had addressed no words to her except to say, “Here’s some food,” or, “Till I bring you some water, you’ll have to get along on canned tomatoes when you’re thirsty,” or other things of that sort. She never remembered having seen him before. She didn’t know his name. He was the only man she had seen since her husband’s death.