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She drew back, at which he laid his great, bony hand upon her, his eyes blazing. She was deathly frightened, being little more than a child.

“I have waited for you many nights,” he explained. “I feared you would never come.” Then, as she continued to stare up at him uncomprehendingly, he ran on: “I am Inocencio, the trader. Every night I have watched you at your work. I want you for my woman.”

Her voice had forsaken her utterly, but she struggled weakly, so he tightened his grip until his fingers sank into her flesh. She began to gasp as if from a swift run; the open neck of her garment slipped down over one shoulder; her eyes were distended until he saw them ringed about with white. The terror of this tall yellow man with the hungry eyes robbed her of power, and she let him drag her toward the lapping water as if she were no more than some weak, wild thing that he had trapped.

Of course she knew him, for, while the San Blas law may banish women, it cannot blind them, and she, too, had studied him from concealment. Although his words had made no impression whatever upon her, his grasp and the direction he was drawing her had at last translated what was in his mind. Then she burst into life. But she made no outcry, for it takes strength to scream, and every atom of her force was directed against his. She began to moan. Her every muscle writhed. With her free hand she tore at his entwining fingers, but they were like jungle creepers 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.