The Last One Left Read Online Free PDF Page A

reading the Guide. She wanted to see the Joulters, and kept teasing Bix until he had me lay out a new course. He said we’d cruise from there to the Berrys Saturday afternoon.”
    “And on that float board you made it to South Joulter, eh?”
    “I knew about where we were when—it happened. I got a rough estimate of my direction of drift from the stars, and it was too northerly and I was afraid it would make me miss the Joulters and take me on out northwest onto the Bahama Banks. I paddled due south to compensate. Paddled and rested. Maybe I passed out once or twice. At dawn I came to the bar. I let the board drift away. I walked until it got deep again, then swam ashore. Every day—I waited for somebody to come—felt worse—kept thinking about the Muñeca.…”
    “Now there,” a gentle, crooning, comforting woman-voice said. “It’s all right. You’ll be all right.” He felt her dabbing gently at his face with some cool, scented, astringent lotion on a cloth.
    He opened his eyes and saw her leaning over him in the lights of the cabin, saw it was the tall brunette, the better looking of the two, but at this closeness she was older than he had estimated.
    “Do you know where you are and who I am, Captain?”
    “Is it—Mrs. Barth?”
    “Then you
do
know. But I’m Mrs. Hilger. A while ago you thought I was someone else. Somebody named Crissy. Or Christy. You scared me a little, you were holding my arm so tightly.”
    He lay very still. He breathed slowly. “What did I say?”
    “I don’t know, actually. You seemed to be trying to make Crissy or Christy understand something. You said something about it not being your fault. Pleading with her, or him.” Her laugh was nervous. “You got quite wild this time.”
    “This time?”
    “You just moaned and mumbled the other times. This time you rose right up and shouted. We should be tied up in another twenty minutes, Captain. Bert got through to Nassau Marine a little while ago. There’ll be an ambulance waiting.”
    He closed his eyes. It was unfair that fever should make you talk and not know you were talking. Somebody might hear enough of the fever words to make their guesses about all of it.
    You could not will yourself to be silent when the fever carried you off. But if you could make certain all they would hear would be a thickened mumbling …
    He shoved his tongue into his right cheek, between the strong molars. He bit tentatively at first, measuring the pain. Then, body rigid, snuffling and grunting with agony and effort, he began chewing his tongue, mashing the sensitive flesh, tasting the coppery flavor of his blood.
    From far away he could hear the woman shouting at him, and then she ran out and called the others. When he felt them leaning over him he pretended to be asleep. God help us, Crissy. God help us. It went wrong. I tried, but it went wrong.

Three
    THE THIRTY-EIGHT HUNDRED POUNDS
of the Muñequita dipped and danced on into the Atlantic dusk. Little Doll. Under considerably more power this same T-Craft hull design had won some savage ocean races. Fiberglass, teak, aluminum, stainless steel, plastic, perhaps ten thousand dollars for such a special plaything. With the twin Chrysler-Volvo inboard, outboards, 120 horsepower each, she could scat at forty-seven miles an hour, the deep Vee hull slicing through the chop, the wake flat
.
    With her fuel capacity increased by the two saddle tanks to over eighty gallons, at her cruising speed of thirty-two miles an hour, the engines turning at 4500 rpm, her maximum range was almost three hundred miles, without safety factor
.
    From the forward lift-ring a hundred feet of half-inch nylon line trailed upwind. She had been bought on whim and loaded with extras—convertible top, now folded and snapped into the boot, searchlight, rod holders, windshield wipers, bow rails, anchor chocks, electric horn, screens, a transistorized Pearce-Simpson ship-to-shore radio tucked under the Teleflex instrumentpanel,