There were three pieces.
The long roll contained only the barrels, the twin dark tubes fixed side by side, but the other held two pieces. One was the part that went against your shoulder—the stock, she thought it was called—with the lever for breaking it open to put in the shells, and the trigger guard and the triggers. The other piece was a hand-grip sort of thing she seemed to remember went under the barrels just in front of the stock. It was mostly of wood, rounded on the sides and bottom, tapering at one end and fitted with a concave piece of steel at the other. She had no idea how it was supposed to be attached to the barrels.
The barrels themselves had a projection at one end, on the bottom, that must fit into something in the metal part at the front end of the stock. She took them in one hand and the stock in the other and began trying to match them. Yes, there it was. They went together, and formed a hinge. She swung the barrels up, and they locked in place.
But there was still the third part. And it was obvious it was the wrong piece for this kind of gun, or that something was missing. It was supposed to go under the barrels, right there, and there was nothing to hold it. The concave end must go against the rounded metal end there at the front of the stock. And you could see it didn’t even fit; it still stuck out at a slight angle. Well, John must have ordered another one to be shipped to them in Papeete. And since the gun couldn’t be assembled without the right piece— There was a little click, and she gasped. The fore end had snapped up into place against the spring tension that held it there.
She stared at it in horror. It was a complete shotgun. It was all there, and it was assembled.
* * *
For the third time in ten minutes Lillian Warriner saw Ingram glance off to the northeast where the squall flickered and rumbled along the rim of the world. She could see no appreciable difference in the squall itself. It was still the same swollen mass of purple, shot through with the fitful play of lightning and trailing its skirts of rain, seemingly no larger or nearer than it had been a quarter of an hour ago—but it was Ingram himself she was watching. She judged by the simple fact that he kept looking at it that he was worried about it, though he said nothing. He continued to bail, the gray eyes expressionless.
Well, it wasn’t likely he’d be running in circles and wringing his hands. And there was nothing they could do about the squall anyway, except get the sail off, and probably he’d send her to wake Bellew. No doubt there was some quixotic male convention against allowing the porcine bastard to drown in his sleep.
She liked Ingram and was conscious of increasing admiration for him, though this of course only added to the burden of her guilt, while at the same time evoking a mild sort of wonder at her willingness to credit her appraisal of anybody any more after having been so conspicuously wrong about Bellew. No, it wasn’t so much that she’d been wrong as that she’d simply had no way of knowing how small even a large yacht could become after a few days at sea. Human beings confined in too small an area were apparently subject to the same laws regarding molecular friction and the generation of heat as gases under compression.
So now not only had they managed to blow themselves up, but the spreading shock wave of disaster had engulfed two other people whose only crime had been the fact they were in the same part of the ocean. The guilt was still hers, and she accepted it, though it seemed a terrible price to pay for the pursuit of an impossible dream, a few minutes of arrant and unforgivable bitchiness, and an accident. There were beckoning avenues of escape: the accident couldn’t have been her fault because she’d been asleep at the time, and she’d been goaded into the bitchiness, but these were sleazy evasions and technicalities for which she had nothing but contempt. They were the type of thing that Hughie— She stopped.
Well, it was true, wasn’t it? And therein, unfortunately, lay her guilt, the real responsibility from which there would never be any escape—the pursuit of the impossible dream, while she knew it was impossible. She’d known it would never work, that temperamentally she was wrong for him and she’d demand too much of him, but she’d managed to ignore the warnings of her mind.
If only, she thought now in her own contained and private agony, she’d left him alone. She was worse than any of them; she’d utterly destroyed him. Because she did love him. She wondered what crimes the human race could have found to commit without those great ennobling causes like freedom, religion, and love.
She glanced up. Ingram had stopped bailing and was preparing to lower the mainsail. She looked out toward the squall still making up in the northeast. “Is it coming nearer?”
“I can’t tell yet what it’s going to do,” he replied. “But there’s no use letting the sails slat any longer.”
“Do you want me to help?”
“No. Better keep pumping. Or just rest for a few minutes.”
She was conscious of numbness in her arms and shoulders, but she shook her head. “No. I’m all right.” She bent to the pump again.
If only she’d left him alone…
* * *
The main and mizzen were tightly furled. Ingram finished lashing the genoa rolled up along the lifeline and looked at his watch. It was 3:50 p.m. The sun, though lower in the west, still beat on them with sullen weight in the sticky and unmoving air that felt as if you were trying to breathe in a vacuum. The day was a squall-breeder if he’d ever seen one. There was no sound except water going overboard from the pump and those other and inexorably increasing tons of it sloshing back and forth inside the hull as Orpheus lurched over on the swell. The whole northeast sky was black now, but then squalls always looked worse when they were opposite the sun. There was still a chance it would pass to the northward of them, and he didn’t want to call Bellew. Not yet. Let him get all the sleep he could. There was a long night ahead of them—if they were still afloat.
He was conscious now of his own tiredness and of the fact he had eaten nothing since breakfast. But he wasn’t hungry; it was too hot to eat, even if there was anything aboard not ruined by the water. He picked up the binoculars and climbed atop the deckhouse. Very slowly and carefully he searched the horizon all across the southwest, finding nothing but emptiness. When he lowered the glasses he saw Mrs. Warriner’s eyes on him. He shook his head. She nodded, her face as expressionless as his own, and went on pumping.
He stepped back to the ventilating hatch and looked down at the water washing back and forth in the after cabin. It was worse, he thought; even with one of them pumping and one bailing, they were barely keeping up with it. He started to drop the bucket in but turned and glanced back at Mrs. Warriner. She was on the verge of collapse. The hell with it. There was no use letting her kill herself. He tossed the bucket on the deck, then went over and picked up her cigarettes and lighter from the deckhouse.
“Here,” he said. He set one of the cigarettes between her lips and flicked the lighter. “Let me take it for a while.”
She surrendered the pump reluctantly. “But how about yourself? You haven’t had any rest at all. And won’t it gain?”
“It’ll just have to gain. You’re not going to help things by keeling over. And while you’re resting, you could finish telling me what happened—that is, if you feel up to it.”
She sat down on the deck, facing him. “It’s not the pleasantest thing in the world to tell, but since we did this to you, I’d say you had every right to know how we did it.” She took a puff on the cigarette and went on. “To understand why he thinks we tried to murder him, you need a little background and a thumbnail sketch of the characters involved. Hughie, as I’ve told you, was an oversheltered boy who never had a chance to grow up; Mrs. Bellew was a rather plain, very gentle woman with an infinite amount of compassion; Bellew, of course, is a pig; and I’m an arrogant and insufferable bitch.”