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THE GIRL OF THE GOLDEN GATE

BY WILLIAM BROWN MELONEY

THE GIRL OF THE GOLDEN GATE

CHAPTER I

The general steamship agency on The Bund was a hive of bustling travelers, their faces alight with the eagerness with which they desired to be gone their many ways up and down the world. A stranger might have imagined that most of Yokohama's European or "white" population had been possessed of a sudden desire to flee beyond the seas.

It was a scene common enough, however, for that season in the gateways of the Far East. Spring, with its heart call to distant homelands, had come again to break the spell of the Orient for many and to stir an unutterable longing in the breasts of others—the men and women who dream always of the day they will "go back," but who never do.

The crowd was a conglomerate, as crowds go, and not lacking in picturesque touches—here where a Chinese of mandarin rank went with a silky retinue; there where a pair of turbaned Sikhs stood near two begoggled Korean priests, muttering in gutturals over their tickets for the South. The placidity and impenetrable calm of these few Oriental faces served but to accentuate the mobile expressiveness of the dominant Caucasian countenance.

Still there was one white man whose features betrayed no expression of interest in the scene. He stood head and shoulders over those around him in a line of applicants at a booking desk toward the rear. There was an air of detachment about him. Apparently he was untouched of the spirit of mystic restlessness and excitement which pervaded the place—that resistless, undeniable spirit which takes hold of even the most unimaginative and lackadaisical in railway depots or wherever else men in numbers set out upon journeys. There was no gleam of the homeward-bounder in his eye—that gleam which is more like the light of love than anything else; there was no expectancy; no sign of eagerness.

At a first glance this man's face seemed no more than a mask. At a second one realized that the features were those of one who must have won unto the priceless possession of self-control. The nose was large and yet as sensitively formed as the freshly shaven lips and chin. The ears were perfectly lobed—the ears of a thoroughbred. The jaw was that of the natural fighter, not heavy and jowly, but cut in a sharp, straight line from the hinge to the point. Tiny wrinkles in the outer corners of the eyelids, which come from facing long distances on sea or land, kept forming and reforming as his gray eyes wandered idly over the heads of the crowd. It is thus that the tribes of the earth's big spaces are marked.

Several times he pushed his small gray felt hat back from his brow and then as absently pulled it down again. When he did this one saw the seam of a jagged scar, still pink from recent healing, which traversed the left temple and disappeared in the dark-brown hair over the ear. Although the forelock and the temples were quite gray, he was not more than thirty-five years old.

His blue serge suit fitted well and the trimness of his setting-up—his whole hearing, in fact—spoke of one of military training. Perhaps it was this suggestion of the soldier that made the Sikhs turn and look back at him as they passed out on The Bund. Yet it was not as a soldier that the port of Yokohama knew him, but by the name of Whitridge and as the captain of the sorriest-looking piece of sea grist that had ever made Tokyo Bay. A brute of a Chinese tramp she was, and men who knew deep waters were still marveling how he had brought her through the vitals of a typhoon—the worst in their memory—which had swept the coast in a fury of destruction.

Chinese tramps and those who go in them are of little moment, but on the morning two months before that the port had awakened to find in its fairway a salt-crusted thing called the Kau Lung, minus funnels and masts and suggesting only vaguely a steamship, it knew that it looked on one of the deep's wonders. The sea must have swallowed her and spat her up again, and those who said this had in mind that tramps which fly the dragon cloth are the unsweetest things upon big waters.

Yet not only through stress of storm had he weathered her, but through a mutiny whose blood rusted her decks. Without mates and alone save for a big Cantonese serang he had done this thing and then come silently ashore to nurse his wounds.

Presently Whitridge stood at the head of the line. A man who looked ill and who told the booking clerk with a nervous laugh that he hadn't seen "the home country" in twenty years gave way to him.

"Oh," answered Whitridge as if bringing his thoughts from a great distance. "I wish to—to book on the Cambodia, please."

"She's pretty full, sir," said the clerk, with a doubtful shake of the head and turning away to get a stateroom diagram.

A woman with hair of the color of gold that has been washed in sea water was coming in out of the sunshine of the radiant March morning. A picture hat of rough bronze straw accentuated the wealth and beauty of her wonderful crown. A long, loose tan coat with full sleeves, made her appear a shade taller than she really was, but her erect, healthy carriage threw the garment about her in clinging folds which softened its fashionable modernness.

She paused for a second, a tilt of inquiry to her vivid head. Then she moved swiftly to the desk where Whitridge was standing.

"I have a letter—I wish to see the director—the manager, please," she said to the clerk in a low, well-bred voice.

Looking up, the clerk gave a start of surprise, recovered himself quickly, and indicated a door to the left. She opened it and passed inside followed by a woman in black, evidently a maid. The clerk's eyes trailed after her with something of awe in them. There was hardly a glance in the room which was not turned in the same direction.

"Out East here we—we see nothing but little, dark women," the clerk began apologetically, facing Whitridge again.

"Ever see Burne-Jones' 'Springtime'?" interrupted the Englishman eagerly. Whitridge nodded. "Gad! Isn't she like it?" Another nod answered him.

"Now, sir," interrupted the clerk, spreading out a diagram. "The Cambodia calls at Honolulu, you——"

"Luck's with you, sir. The last one," and he indicated with a pencil point a small space aft on the port side. Whitridge nodded his acceptance and at that moment the office door at the left opened quickly.

A middle-aged man, evidently the agency manager, emerged, preceding the "Springtime" woman.

"Burr! Reserve an outside room on the Cambodia at once," he called to the clerk booking Whitridge.

Whitridge turned. A shadow of keen disappointment passed over the face of the golden-haired woman.

"Oh, is there nothing you can do?" she asked, looking at the manager appealingly. He glanced at Whitridge. "You don't know the terror I feel—the horror I have of being put inside," she went on. There was a note of genuine distress in her voice.

"If you will permit me," interrupted Whitridge, baring his head, "I will resign my room to you."

"Oh, but that would not be fair. You are very kind, but I—I must pay for my lateness." She met his gaze with an honest, uncompromising directness in her blue eyes. "You——"

"Really it doesn't much matter where I am put," and a note of sadness in his voice brought an expression of interest into her brow. For a part of a second their glances held and then Whitridge turned to the clerk: "This lady will take my room."

He spoke with a finality which evidently was strange to her. She frowned slightly and started as if to protest again.

"You should accept, Miss Granville," said the manager anxiously and in a way that indicated his desire to please a person of some importance. She paused uncertainly as her lips framed a "No," but meeting Whitridge's gaze again she gave a nod of decision.

"I will accept. You are rendering me a service greater than you know," she said gratefully and there was a brilliance as of tears in her eyes. "I thank you—very much."

The manager, beaming with delight, thanked Whitridge and led her back to his private office. At the threshold she paused and turned to surprise Whitridge's gaze fixed hungrily upon her. A smile with which she intended to thank him died on her lips. A startled look came into her eyes. She did not move until he turned toward the clerk, who was asking him for a record for the customs' clearance.

"Paul Whitridge, thirty-four, master mariner—British subject," he said, and the clerk recalled afterward the strange hesitancy with which he gave his name and nationality.

The manager reappeared at this moment and began reading a memorandum to the clerk: "Miss Emily Granville, twenty-four—American." Whitridge gave a barely perceptible start of surprise as the name fell from the manager's lips. He compressed his eyes as if to shut out some unpleasant thought or memory. The manager threw the slip of paper on the desk. "You can make it out, Burr. It's all there. Book her and the maid that way," he said. Then, turning to Whitridge, he went on: "I'm mightily obliged to you, sir. I'll send a note to the ship asking to have special care taken of you. She is one of the big stockholders in the Western Line. Cables came last night for her—she's just down from Tokyo. Some business trouble at home—trustee of her estate dead. Something like that. Must get home immediately. Can't bear to travel in inside rooms. She—her——"

"It's all right," Whitridge said, cutting him off. "I'm glad to have been able to do it."

He spoke with an indication of impatience in tone and manner. Without another word he gathered up his tickets and went out of the agency. The manager and clerk wished him a pleasant voyage, but if he heard them he made no sign.

"I should say so. I think he's the captain that brought that wreck of a Chink tramp in here a couple of months ago," answered the clerk.

"Indeed!" With this exclamation of surprise the manager hurried back to his office where Emily Granville was waiting and thinking of the inexpressible sadness she had seen in the face of the stranger who had resigned his stateroom to her. It troubled her. In the instant that she had turned to find his gaze fixed on her she saw a pain in his eyes so poignant that it hurt her. A soul sounding the deeps of anguish seemed to have been crying out just behind them.

Whitridge, going swiftly along The Bund, was torn by the thoughts which the name of Granville had started. It had been these thoughts which had driven him out of the agency so strangely. He argued and argued with himself that he must be wrong; that there were undoubtedly others of that name in San Francisco. He tried hard to think of other things, but ever the vision of this woman with the golden hair remained dominant. It excluded even the thought of his mother whose message to come home to her before it was too late had decided him in an hour to cross the ocean. His remembrance of the woman was so vivid that she might have waited at his side. The fragrance of her remained in his nostrils. The atmosphere of her girlish freshness clung to him. There was an indefiniteness about her like the mystery of the Spring. The Englishman had been right in thinking she suggested Burne-Jones' "Springtime." She was a veritable gold woman.

As he came to the little hotel hidden away in the fringe of The Bluff's European respectability a Chinaman, waiting as a dog waits, greeted him. It was the Cantonese serang called Chang, who had come out of the maw of death with him in the Kau Lung. Yokohama knew him as Whitridge's shadow.

"Tlunk all pack, master. Him gone ship. What time you sail?" the Chinaman asked in a breath.

"Two o'clock," he answered and looked at his watch. It was past noon. He told Chang to call Suki, the flat-faced woman who ran the hotel servants and who had been so good to him in his first few weeks ashore when the doctors were shrugging their shoulders doubtfully; and her daughter, Oki, and the boy he had nicknamed "Sweeney." He had a little present and a gold piece for each of them—two for Suki.

There were big tears in "Sweeney's" black eyes when "the honorable captain gentleman" said good-by to him. He would never forget him.

"Yes; you will forget, 'Sweeney,'" Whitridge said in Japanese, with a little laugh.

"Oh, yes," agreed Suki, "he will forget. Men forget, but women always remember."

"You know a lot about life, Suki," he answered and turned and went into the hotel office.

At Whitridge's appearance the boyish-looking clerk behind the desk flushed guiltily and hid something under a book. Whitridge handed him an odd silver cigarette case which the young fellow had often admired.

"Gee, I—I'm sorry you're going away, Captain—Whitr—Whitridge," stammered the clerk and faltering peculiarly at the name. "I'll always keep this. What you've said has braced me up and—as soon as I get a little more money together I'm going home. Good-by and—and the best of luck to you."

"Good-by and good luck to you," said the departing guest, shaking the young fellow's hand heartily. "You'll come through all right."

The clerk's gaze followed Whitridge and Chang through the door and until they were clear of the grounds. Then he pulled out an old newspaper. It was what he had hidden at Whitridge's unexpected appearance. Chang had dropped it in packing Whitridge's things. For several minutes he studied the face which looked up at him from a mass of black headlines. It was a portrait of Whitridge beyond a doubt.

"He's Lavelle all right—but nobody'll ever get it out of me. He's square," he muttered to himself, and as he did so he tore the paper into small bits.

CHAPTER II

"You marther get him better you kom-men back?" asked Chang, breaking a long silence as Whitridge and he came to the Cambodia's gangway.

Just then Miss Granville and her maid went by, but Whitridge did not catch her glance of recognition.

"You not—you never kom-men back," said the Chinaman, shaking his head disconsolately and bringing Whitridge's gaze away from the splendid figure of womanhood moving up the gangway. The devotion that shone in the yellow giant's eyes pierced his heart.

"Maybe, Chang—maybe. I don't know," answered Whitridge. "Good-by, old man—good-by." He caught Chang's yellow hand and wrung it and coolies idling round wondered at the sight. "You're white all——" He wanted to tell him that he was white all through, but something closed his throat and he dared not trust himself further. He fled up the gangway.

When he reached the deck he looked back, intending to give Chang a farewell hand wave, but the Chinaman had disappeared. He searched the pier from end to end, but there was a dimness in his eyes and they made no discovery. He turned to go forward and collided with two men, one in the uniform of a United States naval lieutenant and the other in civilian garb.

A challenging tenseness straightened Whitridge. The man in uniform started back a step as if he had been struck. Then, his good-looking, but weak face went pale, his lips parted loosely, and his features became as expressionless as so much putty, under the glance which Whitridge shot at him. It was a glance of but a second. It began in hostility and ended with a lash of contempt as he swung on forward.

The naval officer watched Whitridge until he disappeared through the saloon gangway.

"I—I thought I did, Evans," stammered the officer and making an effort to recover control of himself. "I believed—I thought—that man was dead." His voice went to a whisper. "That—that's Lavelle of the Yakutat."

"He's a rotter, if there ever was one," interrupted Evans bitterly. The other nodded dumbly. "Good thing he didn't land in the navy."

"Until he was shown up I was blamed for—for his being 'bilged,' you know. But really I wasn't to blame. Some of the fellows planted some beer and booze in our room; he stood mute, but I had to testify. They expelled him."

The officer spoke as if conscience-smitten, but his companion did not seem to be listening to him. He interrupted him.

"It's a mighty unpleasant thing to think of being in the same ship with a man like that," he said very solemnly. As he spoke a shudder passed over him.

The banging of a gong and a cry of "All ashore, who're going ashore!" cut short the conversation and hurried the officer over the side.

CHAPTER III

It was with his soul swept by the pain of all the bitterness of his life that Whitridge had turned away from the two men on deck. His memory of bitterness began with Porter Campbell. He had feared from the day, a week before, when the American cruiser squadron had put in to Yokohama that somebody would recognize him. Now at the last moment his apprehension had been fulfilled. He knew the nature of Campbell too well to dare to hope that he would conceal his identity from the civilian to whom he had been speaking.

Then, in a flash, he identified Campbell's companion. It was Evans, of the consulate at Hong Kong. He had read in a paper that morning that Evans was en route home by the Cambodia.

Just as he reached the window of the purser's office Whitridge recognized Emily Granville's maid standing there. The thought seized him that when this ship's company came to put him on the wheel of scorn that she, too, must be there to aid in the torture. He turned quickly as if to retreat. It was not too late; he could escape the agony and the humiliation that he was certain was in store for him.

Even as he turned he paused with a new sadness. The call in his mother's letter which yesterday's mail had brought to him, came to his mind. The words were burned in his brain:

"Just to hold you in these withered old arms again and press you to my breast as I used to do when you were a bonny baby boy—that is all I ask. I would go through The Gate happy—and with a smile."

He turned back toward the window and as he did so he felt the throb of the engines starting the Cambodia down to the sea.

A slight woman in black, dark of skin and with her raven hair groomed slickly after the fashion of Oriental women, looked up at him with a surprised but happy gleam of recognition. Whitridge did not see her, although he appeared to be looking straight at her. She paused, where she followed a Chinese steward aft, and looked over her shoulder at him as he went forward.

"Who is that, Moore—the one in black?" asked Evans stepping up to the window. "Something familiar about her."

"Elsie of Shanghai," said the purser in an undertone. "Sold out and going home."

"Ah," murmured Evans with a lifting of his brows. "Knew her from her pictures. They're in every conceivable place."

"Say, Moore," and Evans' voice was serious, "we've picked up a rotter here all right." The purser glanced up inquisitively. "Lavelle of the Yakutat's aboard."

"Wrong, sir. Can't be. Why—that fellow's dead, Mr. Evans. Died out East here somewhere. Saw it in the home papers only a little while ago."

The purser stopped suddenly, a startled look came into his eyes; his face flushed.

Evans, following his gaze in wonderment, turned and stepped quickly aside. Emily Granville was standing there, her maid beside her carrying a jewel case.

There was a tremor in her voice. Every bit of color was gone from her face. It might have been a piece of Wedgwood. She paused only long enough to indicate that the maid would take the purser's receipt.

"Lord, but that woman's a dream," whispered Evans after the maid had passed out of hearing. The purser looked up at him strangely. "But say, old man, what's the matter with you?"

"That's Emily Granville, of San Francisco—old John Granville's daughter. Granville and his wife were lost with the Yakutat, you know. Lavelle beat them away from the side of his boat with an oar—drowned them."

CHAPTER IV

Emily Granville could not have helped hearing what was said at the purser's window. The shock of the revelation stunned her. It seemed impossible that fate could have placed her in the same ship with the man whose fiendishness had gloomed her whole life.

With her nerves overwrought and her senses reeling, she sought her berth. There she argued with herself that the man who had spoken to the purser must be mistaken. It was not true, she persisted in thinking. The man whom the steamship agency manager had told her was Captain Whitridge—the man who had given up his room to her—could not be Lavelle. His was not a face that could mask such a fiend. It was too fine and yet the sadness of it—the pain she had seen in his eyes—returned to startle her.

"I can't! I won't believe it!" she said to herself over and over again, fighting the sense of foreboding that grew in her heart.

But dinner time brought a brutal confirmation. A passenger at the captain's table where Emily Granville sat blurted out, before the skipper could stop him, how the Cambodia's first officer had seen the man called Whitridge come aboard and had recognized him as Lavelle. He pointed him out, sitting with bent head, at a table across the saloon.

With white face and scared, staring eyes Emily Granville left her place. Somehow she got to her room. A little while later her maid found her senseless in her berth and revived her only to hear her cry and moan that furies—black furies—were tearing at her pillow. And she breathed heavily as one spent from swimming.

Before the Cambodia had dropped Mera Head behind the horizon the loss of the Alaskan liner Yakutat had been dragged out of its ten-year past and gossiped from one end of the ship to the other. What details proved elusive were blithely manufactured into the fabric of a sea disaster which had shocked the world and made a nation ashamed. Men shook their heads ominously and women shuddered as the fact passed from mouth to mouth that Lavelle, the Yakutat's second officer, who had beaten drowning passengers with an oar, was among them. When it became known that Emily Granville, whose parents had been driven away from Lavelle's boat, was also in the Cambodia and lying ill in her room from the shock of knowing that Lavelle was a fellow-passenger, a tenseness came upon things that made the nerves of the liner's officers raw.

Paul Lavelle did not enter the dining saloon after that first night. It became known that he took his meals in his room and left it only after darkness fell. Watch officers saw him from the bridge now and then—a shadow in the night.

"Wandering around like a pariah dog," one of them told a passenger. Often they saw "The Shadow" as late as dawn.

But this night—it was the fifth out of Yokohama—the deck saw "The Shadow" earlier than it was his wont to appear. The saloon was bright and gay with an entertainment and Lavelle was taking advantage of this. He met only one or two straying couples in the darkness and they soon went inside. It was not a night that invited one with moon or star. He could remember few nights like it. It was a dead black—shocking in its intensity. The Cambodia might have been a ship without funnels or masts. Everything was cut off sheer by the blackness. There was a light breeze which seemed to dart out from every point of the compass at once. It whimpered as it went by his ears.

After a long, steady, hard walk "The Shadow" sought out his favorite vigil post against the pipe rail under the weather wing of the bridge. It was to port to-night, although it was hard to tell the weather side from the lee. He gleaned some comfort from the thought that the liner was rapidly slipping down to "the corner"—the intersection of the 180th meridian and the 30th parallel—through which ships great circle between Yokohama and the Hawaiian Islands. She was due to turn it the following afternoon and that meant half his passage in her done. He had determined to quit the ship at Honolulu.

Just after the lights went out in the saloon at one bell—a half-hour after midnight—and the silence of the dark hours had settled upon the ship, he sensed somebody stealing along the side of the deck house. He fixed a shape finally, but no sooner had he done so than it disappeared. He could not tell whether it was the form of a man or woman. Then, he heard a heavy breath at his feet and jumped back defensively. A hand touched him and he grabbed it.

"Chang," was all he could say. He was overwhelmed by the loyalty of this yellow heart which could give and give and ask no return.

"I stow way. Make him work—shubbel coal like hell. No can kom-men here bee-fore. I go 'Flisco." Lavelle heard the sound of a heavy footfall approaching. Chang's ears caught it, too. "Good-by. To-mollah night I kom-men gain."

A lantern light cut the darkness and the ship's night watchman dashed round from the lee side of the deck house, with a club raised to strike. He lowered his arm as he discovered Lavelle.

"Been tryin' to get aroun' up here the past three nights," and the watchman muttered off into the blackness.

"The Shadow" pondered a long time as to what he could do for Chang, but he could come to no decision. The thought that he was in the ship cheered him though as he went to his room. That hand in the darkness and the hand-clasp of a frail woman in black—one with her cage in the zoo of life like himself—were the only friendly touches which had come to him. Elsie of Shanghai was grateful, and had sought him out the night of sailing to tell him so, because he had kept her alive. She would never forget that he had sheltered her from death in the Shanghai riots. Chang would lay down his life to pay the debt he considered he owed him for saving his yellow carcass from the knives of a drunken mob of sailors. Everybody wanted to cling to life and he smiled grimly to himself in the darkness at the thought. He had removed his overcoat and coat and as he put out his hand to grope for the electric flash he muttered, "What a comedy! What a comedy!"

The next instant he was pitched headlong against the side of the vessel by a shock which rattled her like an empty basket. A sea slapped through the open port of the room and choked him with its brine.

CHAPTER V

Lavelle dragged himself to his feet with his breath gone from him. For a moment he thought he was paralyzed—limbs, heart, nor brain seemed to respond. The night was filled with a multisonous orgy of sound.

Then, his strength returned to him as quickly as it had gone. He leaped to the door and plunged into the alleyway outside. He knew full well what had happened as he ran aft and up through the gangway which led from the main to the promenade deck. Another vessel had piled into the Cambodia. There was no land—there were no rocks in the liner's track; nothing but two, three, and four mile deeps on every hand. Lights sprang up in the staterooms as he passed. Somebody flashed them on in the reception hall as he went through there. Thence he took the social hall gangway and came to the boat deck in a bound.

A quartermaster—barely more than a boy—catapulted into his arms. Fear was driving him.

Lavelle spoke in almost a normal tone. Whether it was what he said or what he saw in Lavelle's face that stilled the panic in the youngster's heart no one will ever know. But when Lavelle let him go and beckoned to him to follow him the quartermaster went at his side.

"Everything's gone for'ard!" he yelled at Lavelle above the noise. "Windjammer—big lumberman—no lights—piled into us! Foremast came over—by the board! Bridge—Old Man—chart house—everybody—everything gone!"

Lavelle snatched these things visually out of the blackness even as the boy shouted.

The Cambodia rolled back slowly to starboard, but one who knew what Lavelle knew could feel the life going out of her. Her engines had stopped.

The shape of a sailing vessel—a bark—drew away over on the starboard side and the grinding of metal against metal ceased only to have its place taken by the thunder of the Cambodia beginning to exhaust. Lavelle could hear and feel the stranger ripping at the steamer as she went by. The Cambodia gave a lurch like a drunken man getting out of a gutter.

"She's going!" he shouted in the boy's ear, snatching his head to his lips. "Engineers—all officers report here! Me! Find out what water's in her! Find out how long lights'll last! Tell 'em give us plenty of light. Be a man!"

"Stand by if you're able! Stand by!" There was an answering cry, but all he caught was—"Hell!"

Groping he found an electric cluster on each side of the social hall house and flashed it on. He ran aft and flashed on similar clusters on the sides of the smoke-room house. These lights embraced the eight small boats davited along the Cambodia's sides.

From below men began to come by twos and threes, some supporting women on their arms, some carrying them, some carrying children, some alone with fear tangling their feet and some half curiously. One came lighting a cigarette—a fair-faced young chap—and Lavelle grabbed him in the social hall gangway and told him to let only women and children pass.

"Right O!" was his answer and he took off his coat and threw it away, accepting his task.

The glow of a man who would be obeyed was on Lavelle's brow. Men knew he spoke with the voice of authority and heeded it. They saw the purser refuse to hold the gangway in the social hall beside the fair-faced man and they saw Lavelle smash him to the deck with a blow of his fist.

Looking up from the deck below Emily Granville saw this, too, and, terrified, fled from succoring hands. She saw only a fiend at work.

"Twenty minutes! No longer! Lights—ten minutes!" shouted the quartermaster struggling to his side.

He pantomimed him to take charge of a boat forward on the starboard side. A grimy engineer came through the crowd and reported. Others came and accepted his mastership—men who needed but to be told what to do to find their bearings and run in them.

Like a flame he moved upon that deck. Who he might be few knew, but wheresoever he went disorder became order and the spirits of brave men grew stronger and smiled at death as upon a friend. Like another self—the shadow of the flame—there moved Chang whither he went, striking as he struck and lifting up as he lifted up.

Of a sudden Lavelle saw Emily Granville standing in the port gangway of the smoke-room house, alone, hesitant, terror-stricken. She saw him and as he ran to her with open arms she drew back and then, remembering that he had but turned away from a boat in which she had seen him put a little girl, who cried that God must be upon the sea, she paused in her flight.

In that instant the guards whom Lavelle had stationed there were swept away by a yellow horde from below. It burst out of the gangway and engulfed him in its tide.

There was an explosion as of a cannon fired in the distance where another bulkhead gave way. The ship lurched with a downward twisting motion. The lights flickered and went out and the pregnant darkness burst in disorder and panic.

CHAPTER VI

Dawn suddenly broke upon a sea snarling under the lash of a heavy northeasterly. Emily Granville, her eyes pressed against the blackness, saw it as from a mountain peak. The next instant she was hurtling, twisting downward through space, sightless; her breath stopped.

The sensation of falling ceased. There was a hardly perceptible pause amid a stinging smother of spray and then came the sensation of being lifted—of rising swiftly. She caught a breath and opened her eyes; and again from a seeming great height she beheld in awe the youth of the day striding across an angry waste of waters.

The terrific buffeting of the boat, under the gunwale of which she crouched, had been going on for hours. Until this moment she had been only dimly conscious of it because the darkness gives one no background; no line of contrast by which the mind may measure its impressions. One thought only had lived persistently: that her reason might leave her. It still endured. But the human mind installed in a normal, healthy body like hers does not break so easily. No one becomes insane quickly any more than one becomes a thief quickly. A long process of decay must precede.

As Emily's body readjusted itself to the cockleshell's wild movements her senses began to recover their power of apprehension. She realized that she was clutching a hand—a hand she remembered snatching out of the night as the vortex of the sinking Cambodia seemed about to suck the boat down to the deeps. Through the eternity of blackness which had passed its touch had been her link to sentient life. She held it up now and saw that it was the hand of a strong man, with a strange ring of green jade upon it. The hand closed upon hers gently and trustfully.

Then, she became aware that a weight was upon her limbs and she looked down. A man's head lay in her lap just free of the foaming wash in the boat's bottom. It was the hand of this man that she clasped and that was clasping hers tightly. She bent closer, with a new fear starting in her heart for the face was very white. A stronger volume of light shot into the heavens. It was the man Whitridge—Lavelle!

The boat plunged from the crest of a gray-backed comber and ended its descent with a racking jerk. Emily Granville was thrown across Lavelle, her face pressed against his spray-wet lips. She struggled to draw away, but the sea, as if in mockery, held her close to this man and weltered them in its spume.

When the boat rose again she straightened with a shudder. A wave of horror mixed with hateful revulsion swept over her. She tried to pull herself away from him, but the weight of his head and shoulders and a woman cowering at her side pinned her down. She freed one of her hands, but Lavelle's held the other in a grip which her strength could not break.

Then, gradually, her natural spirit of justice and humanity assumed rule, overcoming even what had been almost an obsession since childhood—her repugnance of physical contact. The water in the boat was so deep that she realized that if she put this man's head away from her lap it must sink. Perhaps he was dying—perhaps death had already claimed him and as this thought came to her she saw the open wound in his brow just back of another jagged scar.

The humility of shame bowed her head and her eyes filled with tears. This man had suffered this wound for her sake; he had come to her in the night when all hope had gone; he had snatched her from the clutches of wild beasts, who had shot him down even as he laid her in this boat. It was because of him that she lived.

She felt a tremor pass from Lavelle's body into hers. His lips parted with a sigh and he murmured something wearily. Then, his eyes opened for a second. He looked up into her face with the glance of a tired child, yet without recognition, and her heart gave a sudden fearful throb. She thought it was pity and knew it not for the stirring of the eternal motherhood that is in all women.

A gust of wind swept Emily's thick plaits of golden hair across his face and his eyes closed again, the while a faint smile flickered across his lips like one returning to a pleasant dream. He snuggled his head closer against the thigh which was numb from pillowing it and the woman did not move.

Chang, looking down from where he stood over them in the stern, like a giant in bronze, nursing the boat up to a sea anchor, alone had glimpsed what had happened. He shouted something which Emily could not understand. Stooping quickly he slipped a hand through Lavelle's tattered shirt.

The Chinaman's glance and the forceful nod of his head conveyed a meaning greater than his words. They implied a task for her performance—the doing of what was in her power to do for this man.

A horrifying cry from forward straightened the giant in a flash. One glance ahead and he gave the big steering oar a mighty sweep. He seemed to lift the boat bodily out of the water. A stream of orders poured from his lips and electrified every bit of life in the cockleshell, save that in Lavelle.

It took but a glimpse overside to transport these sea waifs from their horror of the night into a terror of the day. Elsie of Shanghai started from Emily's side into a sitting posture only to hide her head again. A man with a pointed black beard rose to his knees between the second and third thwarts and gazed round him in terror. Two of the three Chinese in the bows seized oars and stood like warders at a gate.

The boat was riding in a mass of planks and railroad ties—the deckload of the stranger which had sent the Cambodia to the bottom. Every sea was armed and eager with death. Some carried their bludgeons and clubs openly; others hid them under their white-crested capes, flashing them out treacherously and suddenly as the boat rode wildly to the assault. The sides and bottom of the boat would have been no more than paper under the slightest blow from a piece of this wreckage: a touch and every life in it would have been flotsam. Hunger, thirst, and the terrors of the night were forgotten in the menace of the battle which the yellow giant at the steering oar captained with a master hand.

The white man, kneeling between the thwarts, began shouting orders and warnings. Chang, his thick cue streaming in the wind, his jaw set, his face as expressionless as a piece of parchment, seemed oblivious of what this white man did until he saw him start to heave his big form to a standing position. Then he hurled a curse at him that was like a blow—a curse learned of the sea and white men's lips.

But to the women the giant kept calling, "Bimeby him all go way!" and there was faith in his voice and it passed into their hearts. As often as the boat shuddered from an assault cheated of its death strength he abjured them to be unafraid. No white man could have been more gentle or thoughtful.

Through it all Emily Granville clung to Lavelle's hand as she had in the night. What the Chinaman had said kept forcing itself uppermost in her mind—if the man who lay across her lived, all would live.

Even as Chang had promised the boat passed out of the wreckage. The wind dropped suddenly and peace began its entrance into the sea's worried blue bosom. The sun, leaping to its day's work overhead, touched the boat with its warmth. Emily, following Chang's glance round the horizon, saw a speck away to leeward. It might be another boat he told her.

"Hi!" cried one of the coolies forward, pointing up to windward where the broken half of a boat went by.

"No good look him that way!" shouted Chang, but too late. Emily and Shanghai Elsie saw the grim sea grist and the body of a little boy in pajamas tangled in it. Their eyes met—the Magdalen's and hers of the sheltered life—and they wept together, cheek against cheek, in an understanding of woman's heritage of potential motherhood.

In the midst of Chang's tongue-lashing of the coolie who had discovered the wrecked boat, Lavelle stirred into consciousness. Elsie was the first to see his eyes open and stare upward blankly.

"Thank God he is living," she murmured. "Thank God!" and as she spoke he sat up with a start, tearing his hand from Emily's. He gazed round him wildly for a moment, his eyes finally settling on Emily with a gleam of recognition.

"You," he murmured in a tone of awe. Chang's chattering went unheeded. He passed a hand across his brow and at the touch the bullet wound over his temple began to bleed afresh. His head rocked with pain and he pressed it in both hands until it seemed that he must crush the skull.

"Don't, don't," Emily protested, but he did not hear her. "You would better——You are ill. Lie down again, please."

"Somebody struck me——Oh, yes—they shot me. I don't know—I don't know why," and a low moan escaped from him.

The Shanghai woman begged him to lie down again, but he shook his head. He looked at his hands. They were wet with blood. Then he began to examine his shirt for something with which to bind his brow. It was sleeveless; the arms had been ripped out of the pits; the body of it was in ribbands.

"I have nothing" said Elsie, conscious for the first time that she had escaped from the Cambodia in only a black satin kimono and the flimsy silken nightdress which it covered. Even as she spoke Emily struggled up from the bottom of the boat to the fore-and-aft seat against which her head had been resting. With a splendid unconsciousness of self she opened the long tan coat—the one in which Lavelle had first beheld her—raised an outer black skirt and with a swift movement ripped off the deep hem of the night robe which it hid.

Lavelle was facing away from her, but he opened his eyes at that moment to see the strange man seated in front of him start up, with a smile of strange curiousness in his dark face. Emily saw this smile, too, with disgust, and hesitated in her purpose. Then she leaned toward Lavelle and said quickly:

He leaned toward her obediently and she bandaged the wound with an efficiency that brought nods of approval from Elsie and Chang, both ignorant of this woman's latent powers of hardy usefulness and physical capacity—the heritage of a pioneer stock that had torn a world out of a wilderness.

"I thank you," said Lavelle simply and he faced her. "Just as soon as I get this blood pressure out of my head I will—things will be all right." She saw his jaw muscles flex with the pain which tore at him, and his thoughts were of the kindness and the bigness of heart that would let this woman touch him. She felt his eyes sweep over her from her slippered bare feet to the crown of her head, but there was something impersonal in his glance which cooled the resentment which flushed to her cheeks. It was not like the glance of the bearded man down between the thwarts.

It was this man speaking loudly and in a strange foreign accent, which she had unmarked before, that turned Lavelle away from her.

"We cannot be lying here idly like this," he was saying to Lavelle. He stood up as he spoke and threw a leg over the after thwart.

"If you had been about the ship you would know, Mr. Lavelle," he sneered. "For your information I am Orloff Rowgowskii. I am a seaman—an officer—and I will take charge here. These ladies are intrusted in my charge."

Not a muscle of Lavelle's face moved. He spoke over his shoulder to Chang. He asked Chang something in Chinese only to have the giant blaze over his head angrily at the man who called himself Rowgowskii:

The coolie drew the steering oar inboard, for it was now nearly a dead calm. A shake of Lavelle's head silenced his angry chatter instantly.

"My serang—Chang there tells me this is his boat; that he has been in command since we abandoned the ship."

"Yes," interrupted Elsie, pausing in wringing the water from her streaming black hair. "We wouldn't have been here now if it hadn't been for that Canton coolie." She broke off quickly in Chinese and spoke to Chang.

"He is a very good sailor—a very good sailor," said Rowgowskii. "He will be of use—and I will use you, too, Lavelle—properly, if you behave. If not——" He shrugged his shoulders. "I have the means to enforce obedience." He glanced from Lavelle toward Emily and Elsie. "We shall have order here, ladies, and——You may trust me." From them he turned to Chang. "Tell those men to get that sea anchor aboard and set that sail."

"Mutiny already!" exclaimed Rowgowskii, straightening and with his hand going toward his hip.

"Get up out of that and go to your work!" snarled Rowgowskii, and he whipped out a revolver.

In that instant Lavelle rose like a rattler from a coil. There was a crunching of bone against bone as his fist landed full in Rowgowskii's face and sent him spinning overboard. The weapon spun in the air and fell at Emily's feet.

Lavelle staggered from the force of his blow. His eyes closed and he put his hands to his brow. He would have fallen if it had not been for Chang, who caught him and stretched him along the seat opposite Emily. There he swooned.

Emily shrank forward and away from him in terror. This was the Lavelle of the Yakutat who filled her dreams; this the brute who had shadowed her childhood and filled her nights with fearful shapes.

"He's a white man—you don't know—you don't understand," Elsie answered and raised a barrier between them with the words.

Both women, looking over the side, saw Rowgowskii swimming desperately toward the sea anchor. His cries for aid went unheeded by either Chang or the three coolies who were cowering in the bows. Chang picked up the revolver from the bottom of the boat. The act was portentous.

"For God's love!" cried Elsie, beginning an appeal which trailed off into an outburst in the Chinese tongue.

"They're going to let him drown," she told Emily hysterically. "Weren't enough drowned last night? This Chinaman will not do anything unless Captain Whitridge tells him."

Again there was a cry from Rowgowskii and the boat moved with a quick jerk as he caught hold of the anchor drogue.

These cries brought to Emily Granville a memory so poignant and vivid that action was born of the shock. She moved swiftly from the Shanghai woman's side and shook Lavelle by the shoulder.

"Don't you hear? Haven't you murdered enough already? Are you altogether a fiend? Hear him crying now!"

Lavelle straightened. She shrank from the glance he leveled upon her. It was defiant, fearless, burning with challenge.

"I never——" His lips, forming in a tense straight line, cut the speech off sharply at the breath of another word. The old look of pain came into his eyes—the pain she had seen there when he stood at the desk in the steamship agency—and he turned away.

Rowgowskii had crawled along the drogue and was hanging now to the bow. Lavelle hurled an angry order in Chinese at the coolies forward and they sprang to their feet. They dragged Rowgowskii aboard and dropped him in an exhausted, shivering heap.

Chang moved aft to where Lavelle sank wearily on the seat built against the air-tank casing and handed him the revolver. He began an apology.

"More better him dead," he said, and Lavelle silenced him with one word that made the giant cower beside him like a dog under a lash.

Emily, seeing this, wondered, for she recalled, with a shudder, the fierceness of this big yellow man in the night.

CHAPTER VII

As the dawn had come quickly, so order sprang out of chaos under Lavelle's quiet voice of command. There was no shouting; no bluster—a certain proof always that it has been given to a man to speak with authority. A word—more often it was but a nod or a wave of the hand—and as if by magic these yellow men translated it into some needed action.

One of the first things Lavelle caused to be done was the moving of the boat's two water breakers aft. He gave each one a drink, apportioning to the coolies what he gave to the others and even rousing the Russian for his share. When it came to his turn to drink he paused and, with one scarred arm resting across his knee, looked out across the sea mystically. He turned quickly toward the women, after several minutes.

"I wish to say a word to you, Miss Granville," he said in the quiet low tone which seemed to be invariably his manner of speaking. His glance rested on her but for a moment, and then passed to Elsie. "And to you, too, Mrs. Moore: I want you both to know that I am very sorry that this terrible thing has happened to you. Yet women can be brave. I have met brave men, but never any braver than you two women at this moment. Because you are brave I have chosen to speak to you as I am doing. I want you to feel—to know that I appreciate your trying position. I will endeavor to make things as easy as I can for you—so you may not be ashamed—as I should wish my mother and my sister to go unashamed. We may be together only a short time—maybe a very long while. Long or short, every one of us is going to be called upon to show the utmost patience and forbearance—fortitude. God willing, we will pull through and I will give my life willingly to that end at any moment. If I should be taken from you——" A sob from the Shanghai woman interrupted him. "No; one never knows what may happen. There is Chang, and you may trust him as I expect you to trust me—implicitly. A moment ago you saw something——" His glance went to the Russian, and Emily understood. "That was necessary, but I don't wish you to understand this to be an apology—or an explanation. I think I did wrong in not letting that man drown—in not killing him." Emily turned her face away with a shudder. "You may think of me as you please. It is immaterial, but obedience I will have and must have from every soul here." A harshness as of a steel blade meeting a steel blade displaced the gentleness in his voice. "The sea is very treacherous—very treacherous. One must be in order to fight it. That is all."

Glancing up, Emily saw Lavelle gazing out over the water again, seemingly oblivious of the boat. The bearded man forward groaned. He sat up and the sight of his bruised and broken nose—his face swollen beyond resemblance to what it had been only a little while before—renewed in all its strength her feeling of revulsion against Lavelle. She grew sick at the thought of the brutish force of him who could maul a man like that with one blow.

CHAPTER VIII

That night at midnight, when Lavelle relieved Chang at the steering oar, the Chinaman told him that it was hopeless to go as they were going.

Lavelle had observed this early in the afternoon when the wind had sprung up from the northeast and he had laid a course to the eastward. Such boats as this, lapstreaked and air-tanked, practically keelless and without centerboard or leeboard, were never built for sailing and least of all on the wind.

"See," said Chang, flashing an electric pocket torch which had been found among the boat's outfit. "Look him now, master." The light was on the boat compass. "Make him now eas' by sou'. One time turn all loun'. 'Nother time eas'sou'eas'—sou'eas' by eas'—fi' slix ploint off wind. No good! All same dam sklare lig ship."

Lavelle ordered Chang to turn in and the serang handed him the Shanghai woman's tiny emerald-studded watch—the one thing of value that remained of all her years of trafficking. She had turned it over to Lavelle to keep the boat's time. The Chinaman curled up obediently under the lee gunwale, pausing as he sank into the darkness to inquire if the "caplun's topside" still hurt. Lavelle told him that the pain had gone out of his head completely and Chang grunted in satisfaction.

In the first fifteen minutes of his watch Lavelle realized the truth of all that Chang had told him. It was impossible to keep the boat on an easterly course. The leeway she made in only the light breeze that was blowing was appalling. She was not making more than three knots an hour. The breeze which had persisted out of the north since the afternoon he knew for the first breath of the trades—although it was a degree or two above their northern limit. With provisions for twenty days and only a week's supply of water he had to admit to himself that he was courting destruction to try to make the chain of islands—Midway, Oceana, Gardner, and Laysan—stretching away to the northwest of the Hawaiian group.

Of a sudden something which he had struggled all day to visualize came to his mind's eye. He saw a pilot chart of the region as vividly as if it were spread before him on a lighted table. It was here that an offshoot of the Japan Current set to the westward at from twelve to thirty knots a day!

The thought straightened him with a start. To the westward lay two thousand miles of empty, unfrequented sea until one nearly fetched the coast. To the northwest twelve hundred miles at the least, lay the lanes of the liners—a bare chance there of salvation, if a ship sighted one. But with the trades and current against such a helpless craft, there was but one thing to do: take no chances. To the southwest, twelve or thirteen hundred miles away, lay the Ratack Chain of the Marshall group, with the Marianas impinging on its western axis. Under the drive of the trades, sailing before the wind, the boat, with driving, should make between one hundred and one hundred and twenty miles a day; and twelve days of such sailing meant land underfoot and—life! His heart throbbed at the thought. It meant life for her—his gold woman—and suddenly he realized that all his thoughts were of Emily Granville.

With a skillful sweep of the oar he brought the boat round and put her before the wind. By the flash of the electric torch he laid the course southwest. The craft instantly did better and surprised him into speaking aloud, as boats do surprise men:

In the silence that followed he became conscious of somebody moving in the boat. There was a low murmur of voices. It made him uneasy until he located it finally in the space between the second and third thwarts which he had assigned to the women. He had partitioned it off with a steamer rug which Chang had taken away from Rowgowskii. A hand pushed back a flap of the rug and Emily Granville crawled out and stood up timidly.

Lavelle flashed the torch in the bottom of the boat and she came toward him uncertainly. He became conscious for the first time of the poverty of her dress as he saw her ankles gleaming in the light. She was not wearing the long tan coat now. A golfing jacket and a short black skirt, which it had covered during the day, composed her attire as she revealed herself in the torch's gleam.

"Certainly not," he whispered back, moving further aft to make room for her and sure that she must be able to hear the pounding throb of his pulse.

"You should make an effort—try to get all the sleep possible. It brings strength and—forgetfulness, too."

"Not always, but—I came—I thought you should know that Mrs. Moore seems very ill."

"I think—think not." There was a note of hesitancy in her voice and Lavelle caught it.

"Yes," she answered slowly. "But I am here and—and I did not ask. I don't know why I came."

Without another word Lavelle flashed the torch on a breaker at his feet. At a nod of his head she slipped down from the seat to the bottom of the boat. He handed her a tin cup from the air-tank locker. Somebody stirred forward and he snapped out the light until they were still. The spirit of conspiracy made her crouch lower. She hardly breathed until he turned on the light again.

The torch made her glorious head glow vividly. It transformed the thick braids falling over her shoulders and across her bosom into bands of filagreed gold. A mist of pity swept his vision.

"You take a drink; you are thirsty, too," he said, bending so low that his lips nearly touched her head. She turned her face up to him quickly and shook her head.

Impulsively, with a thirst which burned her throat—a thirst such as she never dreamed she would know—she drank. It was only a sup that she took, but in the instant she wet her lips she was ashamed of what this man might think of her. She started up quickly, taking the hand he held out to her.

"You have not done wrong," he whispered. She shuddered that he had sensed her thought. "I will straighten this out. Say to Mrs. Moore that I sent the water."

She pointed to where a light moved low along the dip of the southern horizon. Lavelle recognized a steamer's masthead light at a glance. In that instant it passed out of sight.

"Only a shooting star," he answered, for he would not add to her misery, and she left him alone in the night, undreaming of the bitter thought that was smiting him.

If he had put the boat on her present course an hour sooner he undoubtedly would have crossed that vessel's track.

CHAPTER IX

It was not to sleep that Emily returned when she carried the water to Elsie of Shanghai and, crouching in the cramped space, took the woman's scorching head in her lap. Elsie was murmuring in a semi-coma, sometimes in English, but more often in Chinese. Occidental though she was, this woman's long, hard years in the gateways of the Far East had breathed in her the Orient's spirit of fatalism. The stoicism of the children of the sunset lands was hers; the immobility of feature which marks them was sealed in her striking, irregular features. Her manner of speech and expression were theirs.

"I wonder if they will burn me in hell this way," she gasped as Emily put the cup to her avid lips.

Elsie was in pain. The difficulty with which she breathed told that. Yet only now and then did a hardly audible moan escape her lips.

"He said I must be brave—that I was brave—that I must be patient," and Emily Granville knew that this strange woman was thinking of what Lavelle had said to them in the morning. "Did you ask him—the captain—for this water?" she asked after a seemingly very long time.

"No," Emily told her with a feeling of guilt. "He made me bring it to you. He said it would be all right."

"God, what a white man—what a white man! Oh, I know men, my dear child," and Emily imagined that a sneer was upon her lips. "I know them as the Canton money lenders know their gold." She spoke with a fierce tenseness. "I've trafficked in them—traded in them—as they trade in guns—and opium at Macao." Her breath stopped in a quick gasp. Emily pressed another sup of water between her lips.

"I—I don't know——But you mustn't think these terrible thoughts," and yet as she spoke Emily Granville wondered at the calmness which possessed her. A different person than the Emily Granville she had known for twenty-four years seemed to be speaking and thinking in these wild and strange surroundings.

"I will not get better—I know," said the Shanghai woman presently. "It is pneumonia again—the women of the lighted houses cannot stand the open." She sat up quickly, clutching at her breasts. "I am like fire—and lead—in here. Oh, God, it is so hard to breathe!"

"Only hold me—just this way," and she sank in Emily's lap again. "I saw the way you held him. You are—very kind. You were made for—for the mother of men—strong men—like my—my captain out there. No; do not draw away from me. You would trust him if you could have seen him—him and that Chang—that night in Shanghai. There was a place for everybody—everybody—but the women—the toys from behind the green jalousies. Ask Chang—he—he will tell you. They picked us out—of the dark river. It's very dark now, isn't it? Very dark——" Her whisper trailed away in a low moan. Emily tried to make her take a drink of water, but she refused it. "Will you say, 'Our—Our Father'"—and Emily repeated the Lord's Prayer very slowly and sensed that the other woman's lips were following the words dumbly. "Ask him—my captain—please if he—will not speak to me," Elsie murmured after a long silence.

Emily heard a movement aft and, pushing back the flap of the rug, saw Chang relieving Lavelle at the helm. The dawn was just pinking the eastern sky.

Lavelle saw Emily's hand beckoning and he crept forward. Elsie held out a hand to him and he took it. Her pulse flashed to him a history of what she was suffering. A glance at her face revealed to him the touch of death upon it.

Lavelle understood her glance upward and pushed away the rug. He got behind her and lifted her into a sitting posture. She still clung to his hand.

"Isn't it wonderful?" she asked, looking toward Emily and then up into Lavelle's face. He nodded. "I am not afraid, captain. I've learned—last night I learned—from you—to die unafraid."

A marvelous smile lighted her face. The marks of her hard years sped from it forever in the glow of the new day which suffused the sea and the sky with a spirit of the infinite mystery this waif of life was on the threshold of solving.

"Our Father, who——" she whispered. Then, starting suddenly from Lavelle's clasp she put out her hands to the dawn. "Mother—mother o' mine," she called ecstatically. "Moth——"

Elsie of Shanghai fell back into Lavelle's arms, with a sigh of peace parting her lips in a smile.

Emily looked up at Lavelle and, as he turned away quickly, the pent-up misery and loneliness in her gave vent in a flood of tears. The sobs which she could not choke back aroused the sleepers forward. Death had come and a soul had sped so quietly that it had not disturbed their slumbers.

Starting to his knees, Rowgowskii beheld Lavelle just laying the burden out of his arms along the fore-and-aft seat near Chang. The helmsman might have been an image. The Chinese sailors arising from the bottom of the boat were seized immediately by the awe of the mystery that had so swiftly come among them. They huddled together on their haunches, muttering over some talisman held in common.

Emily followed Lavelle and sat at the feet of the shell of clay, smoothing down the bedraggled dress over the delicate ankles and feet.

"I—you understand—sometimes we can't find words——" he said to her gently, and she nodded in understanding. Nothing he could have said would have conveyed more to her. The gentleness, the kindness, the comprehension of this man were battering a breach in the barriers of her terror and hatred of him. Falling on her knees beside Elsie's body she prayed for strength and fortitude and forbearance.

Emily started up amid a silence broken only by the breeze and the boat snoring away before it. Lavelle was sitting opposite, his gaze upon her. She sensed in the faces of Chang and the others a new mystery of expectancy. Lavelle stood up and handed her into his seat.

One of the Chinamen crawled aft and passed Lavelle a piece of rope and an iron block which had been left in the bow of the boat when Chang cut the fall away. Lavelle turned so that what he did with these things was hidden from Emily's sight, but she understood. As he faced her again she saw that the block was fastened to Shanghai Elsie's ankles, although he had endeavored to hide it beneath the silken gown.

Emily stood up and met his gaze. He was asking her to do something; he expected something of her and she was helpless.

"I know only the simple prayers of the sea," Lavelle added. With that Emily found her voice.

"She—she would want you to say those—and so would I—if——" Her eyes closed, and as from a great distance she heard him intoning the Lord's prayer. She realized that never before had she known its full meaning. There came a pause and she looked up. The boat was fluttering into the wind. The Chinamen, save Chang, who had to stand to the helm, and Rowgowskii, were on their knees.

Lavelle stood with Elsie in his outstretched arms, facing an arc in the sky where a blush of the dawn still lingered. The breeze seemed to pause. As Chang checked the boat's way Lavelle bent over and laid the burden in his arms upon the sea. So might a mother have put down a child to rest.

"'We therefore commit her body to the deep,'" he said very distinctly, "'to be turned into corruption, looking for the resurrection of this body, when the sea shall give up her dead.'"

CHAPTER X

Emily would not eat until at noon that day Lavelle commanded her to do so. Watching him, she saw that he ate hardly as much as the little that passed her lips. She did not see him drink at all. Neither had he drunk at the morning meal. As she recalled this his words as he had given her the water in the night came back: "I will straighten it out." This was the way he was "straightening it out." The thought brought tears to her eyes and made her ashamed.

The sense of loneliness that was borne of Elsie's passing had grown upon her with the hours. She was yearning for sympathy and she would have turned to Lavelle, but she sensed that somehow a new barrier had arisen between them—a wall not of her building, but of his. When he spoke to her his voice was very gentle, but neither his manner nor his speech invited her to say anything.

As Lavelle lay down at Chang's feet, shortly after luncheon, to take the sleep which he must have to meet the night, Emily remarked in a tone of anxiety that he had removed the bandage from his head.

"Yes," he answered simply. "It is all right. The clean salt air is a good physician. The sea hurts, but it also heals—if one will only let it."

His face might have been a mask. The gray eyes closed wearily as he spoke and he buried his face in his arm and away from the sun's glare.

The years had taught Paul Lavelle how to suffer alone. He was suffering now. When he looked up from Elsie's dead face that morning into the gold woman's he thought he saw something in her eyes to make him pause. He had surprised the glance again, he imagined, as he turned round from the burial. He knew life too well not to understand whither a woman's sympathy might carry her.

Emily, looking down at the long, lithe body stretched in the bottom of the boat, kept repeating to herself: "The sea hurts, but it also heals." She sought a meaning in the words which she felt she had missed.

Rowgowskii, drawing near, interrupted her thoughts with a pleasant salutation in French. This big dark man had a finish and poise familiar to her world and he could talk with a brilliance which made it possible for her to forget momentarily the unpleasant familiarity of his black eyes, and the pendulous underlip which signaled the sensuous animal in him. During the morning he had made an effort to be sincerely comforting and reassuring and she was thankful to him. After a few idle words Rowgowskii's gaze wandered down to Lavelle.

"He feels badly over the death of that woman?" he asked, looking up at her with a strange directness. Emily answered with a nod of acquiescence. A smile passed over his face. With a significant shrug, he added: "I understood aboard the ship—the Cambodia—that they were—très intimes." He searched the face of the golden-haired woman to see if his dart had found a mark. But he mistook Emily Granville. She was not one who could be read as one ran. She was silent.

"Of course not. Pardon me, Miss Granville. I was told the painful story aboard the ship. I understand your feelings. You will pardon me, I hope. It is because of what this man is that I fear for you. These Chinamen would do murder at his word. He is armed; I am helpless, but I will find a way."

"We should be sailing in the opposite direction. Did you know that, Miss Granville? Over to the east we should be going."

"If you will remember it was he—this man—who changed the course of the Yakutat," answered Rowgowskii. "I have been thinking that you might induce him to change—to do right."

Consternation seized her at the mention of the Yakutat. It bore quick doubt in her heart; then fear. Her new faith was torn from its moorings. Her mind lost all sense of its bearings.

"I mentioned it this morning. He ignored me. That Chinaman there"—he indicated Chang with a glance—"that beast there—told me that I could walk ashore if I did not like the way things were done here."

Neither had observed Chang for some time, but now Emily looked up at him and was startled by the steadiness with which his gaze was fixed dead ahead. He stood tense like a hunting dog at a point, his nostrils twitching nervously. Rowgowskii followed the direction of the giant's gaze, but could see nothing. Emily started to speak to Chang, but her lips opened only to gasp.

"Two points—starboard bow, master," and Chang pointed one of his powerful and sinewy arms straight ahead.

Emily, Rowgowskii, and the coolie sailors looked eagerly in the direction in which he pointed, but could see nothing. They turned toward Lavelle, who, with his hands shading his eyes, was driving his gaze toward the southwest. The tensity of the moment was terrific. It impinged upon him in every glance. He was the commander; his was the task to bring this boat to land; his was the responsibility. They saw his lips move as if he counted something. As he finished he dropped his hands.

"It is land," he said, speaking directly to Emily, and his voice trembled. "We should be up with it before sunset, Miss Granville. God grant it means your succor—your deliverance."

"Trees—I was able to make out three." Turning to Chang he said: "Haul her up until you bring the land two points off the lee bow and then let her go."

With the enthusiasm of a boy Lavelle next ordered a drink of water for all hands in celebration of Chang's discovery. Never was a health in rare wine drunk with finer appreciation than the simple tepid draught which these waifs quaffed from a tin cup.

Lavelle took the helm himself and a half-hour before sundown fetched a low-lying island which appeared to be between three-quarters of a mile and a mile long from north to south and about half a mile broad. It had a rise in its center like a camel's hump. The northern side of this and the lower land abutting upon it were sprinkled sparsely with cocoanut palms. There was not a visible sign of life.

Emily, standing alongside of Lavelle as they came within sound of the sea breaking against the island's weather shore, saw the happiness which had come into the commander's eyes suddenly depart. It was replaced by an intense seriousness. She could not help asking what was the matter.

"Nothing," said he simply, but the felt that he was withholding something from her.

Lavelle was reading signs which made him pause. First he had noticed the absence of any reefs—an invariable and natural formation of islands in that region of the world. The shore rose abruptly and sheer from the sea. The land was brown and raw-looking.

The wind was heightening, and this fact, in combination with the swift approach of darkness and the unweatherly qualities of the boat, determined him to abandon a momentary impulse to seek the lee side of the island.

Just to the southward of the hump or camel's back Chang sighted what seemed to be a beach. With the coolies and Rowgowskii at the oars Lavelle laid the boat toward this point, bow on, taking the precaution to drag the sea anchor astern so as to prevent her from broaching to in the heavy sea that was making.

Chang, with the painter in his hand, leaped ashore as the boat grounded. One of the coolies followed him. He heaved on the painter with Chang and then ran hack toward the boat to keep her from slewing round. Lavelle saw him reach the side of the boat. The next instant he had disappeared—straight down in the twinkling of an eye.

Everybody in the boat, looked on with dumbness. Not even Emily cried out. They sat in their places appalled.

Lavelle took a running leap from the bow of the boat and landed beside the laboring Chang. With their combined strength they pulled the craft safely clear of the water. Then, he ran back and, before he would permit the others to leave the boat, handed Emily ashore.

As Lavelle released the precious weight he felt the ground under him wobble. Emily staggered where she stood and reeled against him.

"I have forgotten how to walk on land," she said in innocent embarrassment and with an attempt at a smile.

Lavelle made no answer. His worst fears were true. They had landed on a floating island. Any moment might see it engulfed.

CHAPTER XI

Lavelle caught Emily by the arm as the island's heaving reeled her against him and held her. The tense, startled expression which she saw in his face drove the faint smile of embarrassment from hers. It frightened her.

She followed his glance, which was sweeping their surroundings. They were standing in what had evidently been the bed or course of a creek or large brook. It gullied its way clear across the island from east to west, following the base line of the hill.

Before Lavelle could form an answer the island gave another heave. The shell of earth rippled as if it had been so much water.

With a cry of terror and warning Rowgowskii sprang away from the boat's side and went scrambling up the hill. The two coolies, still a-tremble with the fear which the sudden and mysterious death of their mate a moment before had put in them, followed him shrieking.

Chang leaped to Lavelle's side, the spot where he had been standing filling with water as his feet left it.

"Come!" said Emily to Lavelle, starting toward the hill. She took but a step. A sharp cry of anguish, which she tried hard to suppress, escaped from her. Her limbs refused to carry her. They seemed to be breaking with the pain born of the cramped life in the boat.

With a murmured word of understanding Lavelle snatched her into his arms and carried her halfway up the hillside. Chang pushed him as he went. When he put her down in a mat of grass and taro plant tops she still clung to his hand as a child might have done.

Lavelle shook his head. His gaze went searching up to windward and then darted across the island to leeward where the sun was tobogganing down a bright yellow sky—such a sky as invariably presages wind. He turned to windward again.

For an instant despair overwhelmed him. This islet was but a bit of waif land—the bait of a cruel trap which the sea had set for him. Even as he watched it the surf piled higher and higher against the sheer weather shore. This was the fanged jaw of the trap; and it was closing. The swiftly rising wind which whipped his face seemed to chuckle in glee.

To drive the heavy boat through that surf and back to sea was a task which seemed to him to be beyond the force at his command. Nor could that crew get it across the island to make a launching from the lee side.

Despair enters the breasts of strong men only to refuel their fires of determination. So it was with Paul Lavelle. Emily saw the gloom pass from his face. A conquering light of resolution succeeded it. His jaw set again in its familiar line of purpose. Thus she had beheld him on the deck of the doomed Cambodia. Thus he had looked as he had come to her that night.

"We must put to sea again," said he, facing her quickly and in his tenseness pressing the hand with which she was clinging to him. He read her apprehension. "Morning may see this bit of earth mixed with the ocean. It is but a piece of waif land—a thing without an anchorage—something torn from its mother mass by the ocean in anger. For us it is a trap—one of the sea's countless treacheries." He glanced over his shoulder at the surf. "There is no time to lose," he added.

Emily met this revelation of new peril so calmly that Lavelle paused in wonderment as he swung away from her.

"Can't I—do something to—help you?" she asked. She might have been craving a boon.

The wind snapped his words off there. She did not know that he had hailed her as "wonder woman." Yet she glowed at the glance of frank admiration which had accompanied his words.

Lavelle called Chang. The giant started up from his haunches a few feet away, where he had been crouching and listening with eager ear to every word which had fallen from his master's lips.

"To sea!" was Lavelle's answer. He drove his purpose into the serang with those two words and a gesture. The giant hesitated so long as it took to look from Lavelle to the surf and back again. There was doubt in his eyes.

Chang faced up the hill, beckoning and calling Rowgowskii and the coolies to descend. They were perched on its crest like banderlog hypnotized by fear. They did not move.

"Come down out of that!" yelled Lavelle in anger at the white man and instantly repeating the command to the coolies in their own tongue.

The coolies, chattering to each other, settled again on their haunches from which they had half started. They were taking their cue from the black-bearded white man beside them. They would not trust themselves to the earth below which trembled and swallowed things like the sea.

The giant sprang up the hill at the order, hurling at the coolies a curse which consigned forty generations of their ancestors to an additional century of grilling in the fires of eternity. It started them, but Rowgowskii did not move. Then, out of Chang's belt flashed a long knife. He raised it to hurl at the white man.

With uplifted hands and crying that he would obey, Rowgowskii stood up. Chang lowered the knife and paused in his ascent. The leader of the mutineers motioned to the coolies to precede him. They clambered along the rocks, darting glances over their shoulders as if measuring to descend as far from the reach of Chang as possible.

Whether it was Rowgowskii or one of the coolies who did it neither Emily, Chang, nor Lavelle, watching from below, could tell, but a large round boulder was dislodged by the feet of one of the three. It crashed down the hillside with the ricochet of a spending shell, missed Emily by a hair's-breadth, and plunged through the side of the boat.

CHAPTER XII

A moment of awful silence followed the destructive work of the boulder. Even the wind seemed to pause in its flight and the sea in its surging to behold what man would do in the face of this disaster.

Rowgowskii and the two coolies lay in a heap on a mass of loosened earth on which they had been swept down the hill in the wake of the rock. Emily had risen to her feet where Lavelle had left her seated. Her gaze was fixed on him. He stood with his back to her and facing the boat. Chang stood to the eastward of her, motionless. His gaze, too, was fixed on the master.

Lavelle was the first to move. A stride carried him to the boat. A glance revealed to him a hole in the starboard bilge through which he might have crawled without difficulty, big man though he was. Four of the ribs were smashed. The keel was shattered for half its length. Any but the stoutest heart must have admitted the craft to be an irreparable, hopeless wreck.

With a weird cry of insensate rage Chang, who had run to Lavelle's side, turned away toward Rowgowskii and the coolies. No one who saw him and the manner in which he carried his long knife could have doubted but that the serang meant to visit instant death upon the mutineers. His gigantic form trembled with the passionate intention of the slayer. Rowgowskii and the coolies stood in a paralysis of fear.

"More better kill! Now!" cried the giant to his master and with a characterization of the mutineers that was blood-chilling in its anathema.

"Give me that knife," ordered Lavelle quietly. Meeting his gaze and holding it for a moment Chang thrust the blade into Lavelle's hand. He was conquered, but the glow of an heroic splendor was upon him.

There was a bare note of defiance in the Chinaman's voice. He dropped his hands at his sides in token of submission and bent his head for the blow he invited.

Rowgowskii and the coolies under Chang's driving began a rapid transportation of all of the boat's provisions and equipment to a point halfway up the hillside indicated by Lavelle. The master knew that this was no time for punishment. He must have every ounce of strength he could command.

Straightening up from a contemplation of the hole in the boat, his brain busy with plans of repair, he looked toward the sea.

"I'm not beaten unless you drown me in the next three hours," he flung in a mutter at the growling deep.

Turning away, he found Emily Granville beside him. She was looking up at him through a mist of tears. Her own misery of body and soul had been swept away in the instant she had heard the boulder go crunching through the boat's thin skin. She could think only of what this cruel stab of fate must mean to the man captaining the handful of life which he had been chosen to save. Her capacity to think of another and not of herself in this common crisis was a sign of growth which would have pleased her if it had been possible to pause in self-analysis.

And this man, meeting her pitying eyes, smiled at her quizzically! If he had confronted her with a hopeless curse she would not have been surprised. Now she could but gasp in amazement. The comforting words which she had planned to speak would not lend themselves to utterance. In this second she realized that thus would he meet death—undaunted; smiling.

"Fate is treating you—very unkindly, Miss Granville," said he. He spoke in his usual low tone.

"Us," she corrected him, resenting, as she had come to do all that day, his insistence upon classifying her apart.

"Does this mean——Is this the end?" she asked calmly, and she drew his eyes to the hole in the boat. His answer was a question.

"No," the woman answered, searching his face and reading there a message of infinite faith.

Yet even as she spoke the island was a-quiver under the increasing force of the sea's assaults. Nor had it been still at any time since they had put foot on it.

"No man may tell the life of a floating island," Lavelle explained. "In weather like this it is very—very short——"

"Remember what Browning said: 'To dry one's eyes and laugh at a fall. And, baffled, get up and begin again——'"

"All clear, master!" called Chang, interrupting Lavelle and leaping out of the boat with the mast and oars in his arms.

Lavelle summoned all hands. They heaved the boat over on its undamaged side. With a strength which peril had trebled, they dragged it out of the miry, jelly-like ground on which it lay and brought it to a ledge on the hill. Man's work though it was, Emily Granville gave her hands to it, with a strange new will, heaving and pulling beside Lavelle until he called that the task was done. And the while she kept repeating to herself, "'To dry one's eyes and laugh at a fall. And, baffled, get up and begin again.'"

Rowgowskii had seen some wood while he and the coolies had been on the hilltop. Of his own volition he climbed after it and brought down sufficient to make a fire. There was driftwood also in the bed of the creek or gully and Chang sent the coolies to gather it.

As the fire sprang up Lavelle worked the faster where he ripped out the boat's after air tank. With its metal he planned to cover the hole.

No thought of food nor drink had he, though he ordered Chang to serve rations to the rest. Emily carried a cracker and a cup of water to him, but he would not pause.

"Give me plenty of light; that's all," he answered her urging. "Light to work by——"

A racking shudder passed through the island. It flung Emily headlong. The earth on which Lavelle knelt slid from under him. The island's middle, following the base line of the hill, rose like a monster cat arching its spine and hurled him backward, stunned, breathless, helpless.

There was a breath-long silence. It ended with a chorus of wild cries. Then, the great earth mass fell with a thunderous crash, rending the island in twain. The triumphant sea leaped out of the breach it had made and swept the crumbling shore with a mighty wave.

CHAPTER XIII

Awakening to a bewildered consciousness Emily Granville opened her eyes in a glare of light which stung her vision so sharply that the lids shut instantly in intuitive defense. She could feel the soothing warmth of a fire near by. She was prone on her back. An attempt to move her limbs produced a sensation of being bound. Turning her head slightly from the direction of the fire she opened her eyes again timorously upon a sky burgeoning in a new crescent moon and a myriad of stars. The moon and stars seemed so close that she fancied that all she had to do was lift a hand to touch them. Lowering her gaze she saw the sea and heard its wild white horses neighing.

With a cry of fright the castaway started into full consciousness, every part of her racked and a-throb with pain. By a great effort of will she struggled into a sitting posture and then to her knees. The firelight blinded her. All was still within its radius. An apprehension that she alone had survived the riving of the island overwhelmed her.

She remembered the cataclysmic upheaval which had flung her headlong as she stood beside Lavelle where he worked at the boat. She had gone to him to ask him to pause but a minute to take a little food and drink. He had answered her harshly, she had been thinking; and then a mountainous wave had hurled him against her; into her arms, in fact. She had held him with all her strength, but the sea must have been stronger. It must have taken him. Her memory stopped there.

"Captain! My friend!" she called in anguish to the night. It returned no answer. The wind lashed her face and throat as if determined she should be still. She breasted it with the fierceness of abandonment, lifting her aching arms and sobbing to the heavens:

Even, as this supplication burst from her Chang entered the circle of light, carrying an armful of wood. Rowgowskii followed at his heels, similarly burdened.

"All lite, lady! No be flaid!" called the Chinaman. He dropped the wood as he spoke and ran to her side. Her gaze went expectantly beyond him into the darkness. But the one for whom she looked did not appear.

Emily could not utter another word. She sank back, supporting herself by one arm. She was afraid to listen to the giant's answer.

Chang drew back the edge of the boat sail, a part of which had also covered her. There lay "The Shadow" of the lost Cambodia with the bullet wound in his brow reopened where the sea had mauled him.

She crawled on her knees to his side and felt the pulse of the hand which Chang drew out of the canvas. Its faintness killed the gladness which had come so swiftly into her heart.

"No can be; no can be," answered the Chinaman with fiery emphasis. "Him more stlong. Go-an get better more klick. No can kill master so leasy."

For the first time Emily was conscious of a tearing pain in her ankles and insteps. It was more intense than the stab-like thrusts which were piercing the rest of her body. Wondering what could have happened to her she turned so that she could see her feet. The trim, delicate ankles were swollen and the insteps were bruised and bleeding.

"Velly solly, lady," said Chang soothingly and in the manner of a father comforting a little child. "You velly blave. You velly stlong."

As he spoke the Chinaman gently lifted one injured foot. She shrank from his touch and put out a hand to thrust him away.

"You be 'flaid flor Chang?" asked the giant wistfully. The glance with which he looked up at her made the woman ashamed that she had obeyed the impulse of littleness. She caught Rowgowskii staring at her from across the fire. His glance was a challenge to all the fineness of her being.

"I beg your pardon, Chang. I am not afraid of you," she said. She withdrew her protesting hand.

"You my master flen. He say by me when I tell him you hol' him han' in boat: 'Chang, maybe I go-an die. All hell kom-men you go-an save she.' Bimeby to-night when big sea kom-men you save my master. You save Chang. You like me die—I go-an die flor you. You must no be flaid."

The while Chang talked his long yellow fingers were going swiftly over Emily's feet. A surgeon's skill was in their touch. His head was bent, hearkening, where he manipulated the ankle and toe joints, for a sound which would betoken a fracture.

"Thank you, Chang," Emily said gratefully, and presently she drew from him an account of what had happened following the upheaval.

Chang had been standing near the fire on the hillside. He had been thrown down even as she and Lavelle were. The island had broken apart and a great sea had come and gone quickly. The earth went out from under him. It flaked away, carrying him down to the sea with it. He could not stop himself. Just as he was rolling over the edge of the cliff he felt an arm and caught hold of it. It checked his descent. It was Lavelle's arm that he caught and, drawing himself up, he found her clutching Lavelle with both hands around his other wrist. Her feet were twisted in the root of a tree which the sea had washed out of the earth. It was this root which had saved all of them.

Emily could understand now how she came to feel like one who had been broken on a wheel. She could not imagine where she had found the strength to withstand the terrific forces which, according to the giant's description, had beset her. She believed she had acted unconsciously, but at least, she thought, she had proved herself not useless. She found comfort in this momentary reflection, nor did she suspect that a great, new power—a power like unto which there is no other—had dawned in her life.

"I catch him master," added Chang, "but you hol' flor him like a marther hol' him litty bit chile when him big bear kom-men in winter. Chang bring you here flor topside. You eye close. Him master eye close. Him head must flor stlike 'gainst boat: maybe lock hit him. Him boat all go way."

A weary faintness made Emily's eyelids droop for a second. Chang leaped to his feet and crossed to the other side of the fire. She watched him where he lifted one of the boat's breakers and poured a cup full of water. He was back in a moment offering it to her. She drank sparingly. She refused to eat anything. She asked how long it had been since the sundering of the island and when Chang told her that not more than an hour had passed she found it hard to believe him. It seemed to Emily that it must have happened many nights before.

The giant's answer was hardly away from his lips when a shudder went through the hill on the crest of which he, driving Rowgowskii to help him, had fixed the encampment and rebuilt the fire.

"What flor? Whachamalla you?" snarled Chang at the menacing earth. The next breath brought a scolding tone into his quaint voice. "Him go-an be night velly long time, Mr. Islan'. More better you go-an sleep, eh?"

The whimsicality of this speech and the half-quizzical expression in Chang's face brought a faint smile to the lips of the white woman.

"Him all same clay-zee, dlunken sailor man, this Mr. Islan'," the giant chattered on. He saw that he amused Emily. And always he spoke of the future certainly. So far as his speech and manner were concerned he might have been safe in port with a pleasant city in view instead of on the border line of the world beyond. Like Lavelle, he possessed the marvelous power of renewing one's faith.

Of his master the Chinaman spoke as the children of the Orient speak only of their strange good gods. He told how Lavelle nine years before in Rangoon had saved his life from the murderous hands of a drunken, mutinous crew and how his way thereafter had been the captain's way and would be to the end. He recalled, too, the night in Shanghai of which Elsie had told her. He wrung tears from her in recounting the fearful winning of the Kau Lung to Yokohama. She saw the knife scars on the arm lying outside the sail and the scars on Chang's. The wounds of these men assumed a sacredness in her eyes.

"My master all same Chang joss," was the way the giant summed up his hero. "No 'flaid flor enny-sling! Nobody! Him say, 'Chang, die.' Must flor me die."

Emily recalled the strange scene between them at the boat and she understood the truth of this.

Lavelle, stirring with a moan, interrupted the serang, who bent his head and listened, ear close to the unconscious man's lips.

"Him sleep now—more better. No sleep las' night. No sleep to-day. Him velly tli-ed."

Emily leaned over at the giant's whisper and caught the measured, easy breathing of a tired sleeper. Yet she heard something else also.

"—home soon—dearheart. Gold girl—wonder——" he murmured, and Emily wondered what manner of woman it was who was waiting across seas for this man's home-coming. It was not thus he would speak of the mother to whom he had set out to return. It could not be such a woman as Shanghai Elsie. The remembrance of what Rowgowskii had said to her in the boat flashed into her mind. She put it away instantly. She resented it. She knew, as only it is given to a woman to know, that it was not to a mate like Elsie that this man would go.

"God bring him safely to her," she prayed in her pity for the woman of whom "The Shadow" dreamed, and she knew not that she prayed for herself.

CHAPTER XIV

Day was breaking as Lavelle awoke to a realization that he still lived. He found himself in a silence so awful in its intensity and mystery that it made him catch his breath sharply like one does at a sudden immersion in cold water. The peace of eternity seemed to have breathed a spell upon the pitiless deep. It slept.

His long sleep had refreshed him and his mind instantly leaped back to the events of the night before. A glance round him discovered Chang, a hundred feet away, searching the horizon. Rowgowskii lay stretched on the opposite side of the fire.

Just as Emily had imagined him lost so Lavelle for a moment believed her gone. His senses went crashing, but they reordered themselves instantly at the touch of a warm body at his side.

Putting his left hand out to raise himself it fell on Emily not half an arm's length away. There exhausted nature had bent her head in slumber at midnight when the wind hushed. There Chang had covered her again with the boat sail. She lay with her right arm under her vivid head and her face toward the new day. One long golden braid curled across the hilltop's wet grass where it had been flung unconsciously in her sleep. The other hung across her exquisite bosom, rising and falling gently with her breathing, and its end trailing the ground. Such an expression as Lavelle had so often seen in the faces of play-weary children was in hers.

Slipping out from under the sail, not daring to breathe, Lavelle gently drew the canvas back over the sleeper's shoulders and stole toward the Chinaman. A slight giddiness assailed him for a moment and with it there came a reminder of the old pain which he had felt upon awakening first in the boat.

Chang's first glance was directed at Lavelle's forehead and what he saw there pleased him.

But it was of the night that Lavelle would hear, and the Chinaman rapidly unfolded the wondrous tale of how their lives had been saved by Emily. The wrecked boat was gone. Emily, Lavelle, Rowgowskii, and Chang alone remained of those who had escaped in their party from the Cambodia. The two coolie sailors had been gathering wood at the foot of the hill when the upheaval came. They were gone. At the end he whispered: "You lose him plistol out you plocket. Nobody know—only Chang, master."

The ocean bore no trace of the half of the island which had been torn away. In the heavy wind and sea which Chang reported of the first part of the night it was Lavelle's opinion that the derelict mass, bound together only by a mattress of interlaced roots and vegetation, must have resolved its parts with the waters.

Owing to Chang's having placed the water, provisions, and the boat's equipment high on the hill when the craft had been emptied in the evening, the sea had been able to steal but little. The treacherous bit of earth which remained offered, too, an important contribution to the food supply in a wealth of taro plants, the tuberous substitute of the potato in the islands of the Pacific. It is of this that the Hawaiians make their poi.

By the bearing of the rising sun Lavelle noted that the island had swung round completely during the night. The side of the camel's back-like hill, which had been toward the south the preceding evening, was turned to the northward. The crest of this hill was at least two hundred feet above sea level. As the island lay now its northern side sloped easily for perhaps fifty yards and then broke off abruptly in a sharp cleavage fifty feet sheer to the sea.

The hill's base was slightly less than the island's half-mile width. A gentle slope marked what had become the eastern shore; a straight palisade rise of two hundred feet, the western side. A gradual slope on the hill's southern side blended at the foot with an undulating meadow, green with grass and taro, and about three-quarters of a mile in length. A lone palm tree rose in the center of this patch.

The top of the hill presented a flat surface of a city half-block square. At no distant time a thatched hut had stood there. It was of the remains of this that Chang and Rowgowskii had built the fire.

While he sipped a cup of water which Chang brought to him, Lavelle took stock of all these things. Not one thought of solace could he draw from the bitter, hopeless scheme which unfolded itself to his gaze. By the time the non-arrival of the Cambodia was read into disaster and a searching ship sent into these seas the end would have long since come to this island. Well he realized the emptiness of this stretch of ocean and the one chance in ten thousand which might bring a stray merchantman or trader stumbling upon them. Well he realized the slight tenure of the crust of earth which held him. Judging from its assumed position it had drifted a phenomenal distance for that latitude. He believed it must have been ripped away from one of the islands of the Hawaiian group. That it had survived so long seemed to him miraculous and but emphasized the imminence of its early dissolution. What had already happened since the landing confirmed in his mind that the next storm would be the mother of the island's oblivion and all it held.

Floating islands are uncommon in any but the most placid waters. Yet in the phenomena of the sea's scheme of things they are common occurrences. The charts of all big waters are dotted with their records. Shipmasters come to port reporting an island where one was never before and where it would seem against all reason that one should be. Still man imbued with the unconquerable mystery of the sea writes this report on his charts for all times. First he writes it as a fact, justifying its assumption as such. According to its reported size, ships go searching for it—men-o'-war, leisurely merchantmen, vagrant traders. No island is found. Only sea is there. But man does not trust the deep; he never will. He does not erase his record. He marks it "P.D."—position doubtful. Years pass without further report of an island in this locality. Then he goes as far as he dares. He writes on his charts "E.D."—meaning "Existence doubtful."

How many a well-found ship, sailing in a sea charted clear and deep, has blundered into islands like the one which held the Cambodia castaways and suddenly come unto her last port? No man may tell. Seldom, however, do ocean traffickers meet with these waif lands north or south of the twentieth parallels.

With never a dream that this could be one—here in the thirties—though the absence of reefs and the raw and broken aspect of the island shore had given him pause, Lavelle had trapped himself. He had captained her, for whose salvation he would gladly lay down his life, into a prison to which death held the key.

It was with this bitter, self-blaming thought, and tortured by it, that he turned away from the sea to behold the gold woman coming toward him with a wistful smile. He ran to meet her and his soul cried out at the denial of its impulse to fold her to his heart and soothe her hurts.

CHAPTER XV

Three days of life-renewing, hope-burgeoning weather had followed that silent dawn—days of placid seas and gentle breezes; and nights alight with stars and a growing moon. The island had been motionless. It might have been one of the Blessed Isles in a world where life was everlasting.

Isle of Hope Emily had christened the bit of floating earth, nor could she have told why optimism reigned in her heart and soul. She was unaware that she was reflecting only what the manner of Paul Lavelle gave forth. His every act and word was a reassurance of faith and the motif of her ever-increasing wonder of him.

Yet it was but a mask of service which Lavelle had determined to wear for this woman's sake. He had put it on in that daybreak when he had met her coming toward him and heard her calling:

There had welled in his heart at that moment the gentle Stevenson's prayer for grace—a prayer which had sustained Lavelle often in peril and sorrow—and it poured from his lips to find an echo in the woman's, for she, too, knew it:

"'Grant that we here before Thee may be set free from the fear of vicissitude and the fear of death, may finish what remains before us of our course without dishonor to ourselves or hurt to others, and, when the day comes, may die in peace. Deliver us from fear and favor; from mean hopes and cheap pleasures. Have mercy on each in his deficiency: let him not be cast down; support the stumbling on the way, and give at last rest to the weary.'"

To help this woman's spirit to be unafraid was all that was left for him to do for her. It was the most he would ever be able to do for her. Of this Lavelle felt certain. He knew the sea too well to deceive himself with a false hope that its kind mood would continue long. But while life lasted it was his purpose to live it fearlessly and as if years still measured the span and not swift minutes.

Under his hand the discipline of shipboard prevailed. There was not a moment, by day or night, when a lookout for sign of succoring sail or light went unkept. With Chang, his right hand, Lavelle divided the night watches, not trusting Rowgowskii. Even Emily, according to her wish, helped in the tasks of preparing the food and tending the fire by day. An out-of-doors woman by tradition and inclination, a powerful rider and swimmer, the pride which she had always taken in her physical well-being was standing her in good stead now.

Rowgowskii, in the first realization of the extremity which had come to pass, had abandoned himself to despair. It was incredible that he had ever been, as he claimed, an officer in the Russian navy, or otherwise a commander of men. He was absolutely spiritless; an exemplification of the truth that cowards die many times before their deaths.

But with the coming of the second day of fair weather his funk lifted and he went to his appointed tasks with a willingness which was emphasized by his previous sullenness.

Having observed at the outset that the island's wood supply was limited, Lavelle had been husbanding it by burning sod. He used the wood solely for the signal fires of the night.

Now on this morning of the fourth day he again put the Russian to cutting turf from the hillside, the while he and Chang, armed with the boat axe, set forth to cut down the palm tree in the meadow. Rowgowskii, the preceding evening, had suggested its addition to the signal fuel.

"You will not be long, captain?" asked Emily as Lavelle paused to look back at her in leaving the crest of the hill.

"And you—you will be careful," she warned, and unashamed of the tremulous note of anxiety which crept into her voice. He nodded. This man's presence had become very necessary—very precious to her.

"It's your watch on deck, you know," Lavelle called cheerfully. Then, with a quizzical lowering of his brows and in a tone of pretended sternness, he added: "Hold your course. Steady as you go—and keep a sharp lookout."

"Aye, aye, sir," she answered, simulating the speech and manner of a sailor to an officer.

"We'll be back in a jiffy," said Lavelle. With that he and Chang swung away down the hill.

Emily went to the edge of the slope and watched them descend, the yellow man always leaping ahead to test and examine the ground. At the foot Lavelle looked back. He paused upon discovering the watcher and waved to her. An impulse to follow him seized her, but remembering that he had intrusted her with the lookout she overcame it. With a wave of the hand she answered his signal of cheer, and as through a mist saw him go away from her across the meadow toward the lone tree.

CHAPTER XVI

Just as Lavelle paused at the foot of the hill and waved his hand, Rowgowskii looked up from where he was cutting turf on the eastern slope. Unconsciously his hand went to his flattened nose. It was an action which invariably had come to accompany any glance which had Lavelle for its objective.

Emily was hidden from his view, but the Russian could imagine her standing up there on the crest answering Lavelle's signal. He knew well, too, the light there must be in her eyes. He had surprised it there many times in the preceding three or four days, even as she had startled the animal lust in his.

Rowgowskii dropped the piece of metal which he was using for a cutting tool. It was part of the boat's air tank with which Lavelle had planned to repair the damage done by the boulder. His gaze followed the two men crossing the meadow until he saw Chang stop suddenly and look back. He started as if the Chinaman had the power of reading his thoughts. A guilty conscience is ever the quick prey of an honest eye. With much show of industry he picked up his cutter and resumed the stripping of turf. This activity lasted but a minute. Then, his gaze wandered around the empty sea, only to return to the two men below.

In the second that the Russian's eyes picked them up again a menacing oscillation passed through the earth and brought him in terror off his knees. He saw the Chinaman pitch headlong out of sight. The next second whipped Lavelle from his view. The palm tree remained the single object in the meadow.

Rowgowskii hesitated a moment, hearkening for a sound from above him or from the meadow. The silence was unbroken save by the purr of the morning breeze.

With the sneak of a stalking panther in his tread he darted around to the southern slope. A second's pause, a flashing glance behind to reassure himself that "The Shadow" and the yellow man were, indeed, gone, and he sprang up the hill.

CHAPTER XVII

Emily held Lavelle and Chang in view until they were halfway to the tree and the Chinaman halted and looked back. It was as if the giant had flashed a message to her. Her heart gave a throb of apprehension. Her breath caught in her throat. Her limbs trembled. She realized that she was alone on the hill with Rowgowskii. Only her own soul knew her repugnance of this man which had grown with the hours since they had come to the island.

Even as her mind bore the thought Emily became ashamed of her trepidation and self-consciousness. It was unworthy of the kind of woman that Lavelle's fearlessness of soul and fortitude made her desire to be.

Mortified, and with a flush mounting her cheeks at what she considered her mean selfishness, she turned from the meadow and the stretch of ocean southward. She walked across the hilltop. North, east, and west her gaze met an empty blue expanse of water. The hill oscillated and she swayed with it unconscious of the motion. Her attention was held by the glint of a white wing high against the cloudless azure sky to the northward where a frigate bird went seeking a mate.

"But we haven't," whispered a voice close to her ear. With the words an evil, burning breath struck her cheek and Rowgowskii's two powerful arms encircled her.

At the touch there leaped to life in Emily that furious strength which has been given to women to defend themselves or their offspring from besoiling or destroying hands.

With a shriek she twisted herself in the brute's clasp and hurled him from her, but not before he had succeeded in crushing his hot, sensuous lips against her throat. She struck him in the face with both hands clenched. Landing where Lavelle had smashed him in the boat the morning after the wreck of the Cambodia, the blows drew blood and swept him from his feet. He went over backward and, falling, carried with him the boat mast which was stepped in the center of the hilltop for a signal staff.

Sending a piercing shriek toward the meadow, Emily ran toward the southern slope. Rowgowskii staggered up in her path with outstretched arms as if to stop her. He hesitated and stepped aside. The unaccountable action arrested Emily.

"Go on yelling!" he said wrathfully. "There is nobody to hear. We are alone—you and I."

The Russian laughed as she faced him helplessly and incredulously, her strength, for the moment, gone from her. She had no distinct thought. The capacity of thinking and feeling seemed to have never been.

"They went like that," the brute went on with a snap of his fingers. "Just as we are going to go—in a—in a very little while." A lingering quaver went through the hill. He started cravenly. "Feel that, eh? The end is very near."

Emily was silent. Her gaze darted away from her torturer and around the sea. It came to rest for the smallest part of a second on the western edge of the hill. Determination was born of the thought which the glance suggested. Here was a means of escape.

The cliff was perhaps an hundred feet from where she stood. If she could only get over there a step would carry her into the presence of her God unashamed. Her purpose was formed. There was nothing left for which she cared to live. The camp fire was between her and her goal, but she heeded it not.

Rowgowskii's gaze, following every movement of the glorious figure of womanhood before him, set the fires of his fiendishness flaming in new desire. He advanced a step in front of her. She retreated a step.

"I wonder if you would have treated Lavelle this way if he had come to love you? Eh?"

There was no answer for him, but Emily's lips moved in murmuring what her numbed senses could recall of Lavelle's prayer for grace.

"Would you have treated him this way? Tell me, ma beauté," he leered. He took another step toward her. Again she retreated. Still advancing, the passion of the brute in his eyes scorching her, he said:

His voice broke in a stammer. A piece of burning sod rolled out of the fire behind his prey.

Emily gave no heed. She put one foot on the sod and smoke curled up where it burned through the sole of the canvas sandal which Chang had made for her. Then she lifted the other foot beside it.

Nor did this woman cry out in pain nor a feature so much as wince. An immortal glory was in her countenance. The look she bent on the man before her sent him back, cowering in fear and awe.

CHAPTER XVIII

In the instant that the sublime spirit of the gold woman conquered the beast who baited her Lavelle burst over the crest of the hill from the southern slope.

Like the captain of an avenging host marching with banners of flame he came into Emily Granville's vision. A pallor as of death was in his face; a fire of irrevocable decision in the glance with which he swept the scene before him into his comprehension.

Lavelle's hand fell on Rowgowskii's shoulder and hurled him round before him. The craven crumpled to his knees. The beginning of a cry of terror died in his throat in a mute gasp. To him this man who stood over him was come back from the dead.

"Pray—if you can," said Lavelle in a grim voice of fate. He stepped back a pace as he spoke.

It was a pronouncement of doom that he had uttered. Rowgowskii's gaze went from Lavelle to Emily. His hands went out to her in supplication. His lips moved but made no sound.

Rowgowskii turned from Emily at her call to meet again the merciless gaze of Lavelle.

The light of all reason went out of the doomed man's face. A maniacal cry burst from him. He leaped to his feet. Lavelle sprang at him. With a speed of a hawk's swoop the Russian turned and fled to the cliff. A second he hesitated on the brink and then plunged over it headlong.

A moment of silence, then a splash and a lingering cry echoed up the face of the cliff. The gold woman's tortured nerves relaxed. Senseless she dropped where she stood.

CHAPTER XIX

With the Russian's wild death cry still echoing in her senses Emily awoke a half-hour later to a vivid consciousness. She found herself lying in the protecting shade of the boat sail tent which Lavelle had erected for her habitation near the eastern side of the hill on the day after the landing. The scene upon which her eyes had closed flashed again across her vision and she sat up with a shudder.

The movement brought to her senses for the first time a realization of physical pain. Remembering the strength of spirit which had been given to her to stand upon fire she throttled the cry which sprang to her lips. Her suffering became precious to her even as the agony of travail is dear to a woman. Her eyes welled with hot tears.

Putting out a hand blindly she found the little canvas sandals. She picked them up and pressed them to her bosom. The charred heels and soles crumbled away at her touch. She kissed them with the impulse which would carry a warrior's lips to his colors. To her these pieces of canvas were the symbols of a faith which had sustained her in a trial which passed her understanding.

Looking downward at her feet, she found both of them bandaged. She had been dimly conscious of Lavelle doing this service for her. She recognized the bindings as pieces of the hem of her night robe with which she had bound his brow in the boat. A mysterious thrill went through her; her eyes overflowed.

The breeze lifted the edge of the tent and disclosed Lavelle to her view. She caught the canvas and held it back. He was just finishing the restepping of the signal mast. His back was toward her.

Straightening from his task to his full height and with one of his strong bare arms extended to the mast and the other hanging loosely at his side, he looked out over the sea to the southward. His tattered shirt and trousers still wet with sea water clung tightly to his lithe, powerful form. There was a challenge in the set of his head and in the grim line of his jaw. His attitude breathed of a man indomitable—one who, indeed, was master of his fate; the intrepid captain of his soul. His destiny would find him thus.

The woman in the tent watched this man in wondrous awe, nor could she know that his thoughts were alone of her at that moment—of a woman sanctified in his sight not alone by living fire, but also by the passion of a love unutterable. She saw the breeze toss the forelock of his dark brown hair. He started. She dropped the edge of the tent, realizing, without any amazement, that they two were alone in an empty, far-flung waste of the world. She laid her head down on her long coat which he had rolled into a pillow. She dared not speak.

During what seemed an interminable time, the woman in the tent heard Lavelle moving about outside, and, of a sudden, the singleness of his footfall brought Chang surging into her thoughts. A moment later Lavelle stood in the tent entrance, carrying food and drink. She sat up to behold in his face an expression which stabbed her with its pain.

All she could do was shake her head that she was not. Discovering what it was she was holding tightly to her bosom he turned away. He understood.

Presently he pressed her to eat the meal he had prepared. Although it nearly choked her to swallow she ate and drank because he wished her to do so.

The man sitting in the tent entrance had his gaze fixed far away upon the relentless ocean's breast. He nodded his head sadly.

"God's benison be with him—the truest, the best friend it has ever been given to any man to know," Lavelle said, facing Emily. After a second's pause he went on in a tense voice:

"This treacherous earth—treacherous with the sea's treachery—opened at our feet down there like the snapping jaws of a monster. Chang went first. I put out a hand to save him. The jaws got me.

"It seemed very hard that the end should come like that—without even a moment to say good-by." Lavelle paused again. "You can have no idea," he resumed, "what a torment of waters is down there—waters filled with reeds and roots which catch at one's limbs and cling to them—like serpents.

"As we came up to—to snatch at the crust of shore—it crumbled at our touch. I could see the hill. You—you had just turned away. As I looked your head passed out of my sight. Then, we saw that—that fiend climb up here. We saw him stop and—and look back. I shouted—that is, I tried to shout, but I had no breath. I never was so weak in all—all my days. But whether he heard me or didn't he must have seen what had happened to us. He would never have dared come near you—if he hadn't.

"The earth broke under our hands again and again. The sea tore at us. There is a tremendous current under this island. I heard you cry for—for us to come to you. Chang heard you. But we were caught—struggling like two foolish animals in a trap. When the signal staff went down——Why, I think—I could not think. We saw you come to the edge of the hill there—heard you cry again, but the sea——"

Lavelle became silent. His eyes sought the great blue deeps below. Emily could not speak. Her soul was crying to comfort this man. The yearning of an unknown motherhood was in her heart.

"Like most sailor men—deep-water men——" he went on, "Chang could not swim. I imagine he must have found a foothold in one of the roots in the water. He caught me—suddenly—lifted me bodily, it seemed, up out of the sea—on to the shore. He was very powerful. I turned to help him. All was quiet up here. He shook his head and—and let go.

"A second only he floated. Then the sea sucked him—down. He went with a smile—unafraid. And I came to—to you—on the hill. You don't——"

His voice broke. He leaped to his feet and walked away. It is not a good thing that a man's tears shall be seen by a strange woman.

CHAPTER XX

With the going down of that day's sun a long, heavy swell, accompanied by the lightest of breezes, set in from the southwest. It was an ominous sign to Lavelle, nor could he conceal this thought when he carried Emily's evening meal to her. She asked him to bring his food and eat it in the tent entrance.

The castaways ate their pitiable rations in silence, but before this short time passed the island was moving in concert with the heave of the sea.

A shocking, sense-stunning crash where a part of the western cliff slithered down into the deep sounded the end of the meal. While the roar was dying away the eyes of the man and woman met and held in a glance of understanding.

"I think—it is not very far off, little woman," he answered. He told her this truth because he knew hers was a spirit unafraid. By it she knew that he knew and understood many things which words might not encompass.

"I thank you—so much," was her answer. She spoke with a frank gladness. But the slightest quaver was in her voice.

Lavelle left her to build up the signal fire. He felt certain that it was for the last time. It was to him the funeral pyre of a hope which died by the minute, and he laid on the fuel with unsparing hand. Some night-borne craft might by miracle see its gleam, yet the light of a moon in all the splendor of fullness lessened this remotest of possibilities to the barest minimum.

Although Lavelle was gone from the tent but a little while, it seemed an eternal time to the woman, who waited for his return. And when he came her eyes were dry; and she held out a hand for him to help her to her feet.

"I have no pain," she said, answering his protest. "I speak the truth. I wish to be out in the night—with you."

After the first step or two Emily walked freely and, indeed, the pain of her burns had passed away. The while Lavelle knelt to make a seat for her she stood sweeping the heavens with her luminous eyes. Across the northern sky a large star, falling, burst upon her vision.

"See!" she exclaimed, and then, turning toward him, she repeated Calpurnia's words to Cæsar:

"'When beggars die there are no comets seen;
The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes!'"

It was a night made for life and love and the joys of living—not death; a night to set the soul singing in gladness of being. It seemed to have garnered the uttermost spaces of their brightest jewels to bedeck its violet cope and make it the harder for this man and woman to say farewell to mortality.

Save in the intervals when Paul went to replenish the fire he sat at Emily's side, and together they watched and listened to the majestic travailing of the weariless, pitiless deep.

It was not far from midnight when the sea tore away half of the meadow and the palm tree. This bit of earth floated in their sight for but a breath. It was; then it was not. Where it had been was a patch of leaping, roiling waters, white-fanged like wolves at a kill.

"The end—it will come—like that—quickly," she whispered. "I will—will not be afraid—I am sure—if you will let me hold your hand."

Paul Lavelle could make no answer save pressing the gentle hand in both of his. It was sufficient to comfort her. After a long silence she asked:

"I don't know," he answered simply, "unless it is because I can't believe—that a marvelous creation like mankind stops—with what we call death. I can't believe that wondrous beings—like you—and Chang, capable of the sublimest thoughts and impulses—come and go and are no more. Rather I think that what we are facing is 'Yet a little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to sleep.'"

Nor was Emily conscious of her hand clasping Paul Lavelle's with love's tightness in its pressure.

"My father believed as you," she began, only to stop short as she felt him start. She had ever been on her guard against speaking of her people to this man, for she knew his sensitiveness as to the past. But once had she made reference to the tragedy which embraced her life and his. That was in the boat when she had assailed him to save Rowgowskii from drowning. Now she knew not what else to say.

"No, no, please don't!" she protested. "Not that tone; not that distance. Call me friend, comrade—just as you have been doing these past few days. Call me Emily. It would please me; it would sound—like home to—to hear somebody call me by the old name once more."

"Emily," Lavelle went on, "I should like you to know what happened that night on the Yakutat—the truth. If you——"

"No," she interrupted him. "If I say to you that—that I do not wish you to tell me, you will not misunderstand?"

"No, no!" she cried. "You do not have to tell me what happened. Don't you understand? I know. I know you to be brave—and true and upstanding. I know you acted as only one unafraid—fearless as you are, could have acted. And I thank God that he has given it to me to know you and—to understand!"

Her voice broke. Her eyes, swimming with tears, saw him turn toward the fire. A weight seemed lifted from him. She sensed the coming of a great peace to his soul.

CHAPTER XXI

A high dawn—one presaging storm—found the castaways standing beside the signal fire which swiftly smoldered into the ashes of hopelessness. The swell had increased during the morning hours. The hill now afforded a footing unsteadier than a laboring ship's deck. The breeze of the night continued light and steady.

With the first glimmer of day Lavelle went searching the sea. His gaze swung the horizon again and again, following the withdrawing mantle of night only to confront the old bitter emptiness of all the days that had gone before.

Lavelle's eyes kept seeking the distance, but Emily's, untrained, sought the sea at hand. So it was that her sight was the first to discover a sail barely two miles away to the south and west.

At the discovery her throat closed. She could not speak. She stood breathless, half in trance. Lavelle, turned to the eastward, felt her clutch his arm. He sent a glance whither she dumbly pointed.

He seized her by the arms and shook her as a boy meeting a boy playmate might have done. Her whole being thrilled at his touch. A glorious light of love came into her countenance, but he saw it not.

As he spoke to her he dropped her arms and his glance sprang away to find the sail again. Fixing it, Lavelle could not control his amazement. Emily saw a great seriousness succeed the expression of delight in his face and manner. A chill touched her new-born hope.

"I don't know what to tell you. I am not sure yet. Still there is something strange——"

Lavelle, indeed, was puzzled. The strange sail was an iron or steel bark of perhaps twelve hundred tons, hove to on the port tack. Her forecourse and foretopsails were set. The foretopgallantsail hung in its clewlines and buntlines. The maintopgallantsail and topsails were set and laid full aback against the mast. The main course was clewed up. The peak of the spanker had been let go and the gaff was flailing from side to side. She carried two skysails. These and the royals were furled. All of the headsails, with the exception of the foretopmast-staysail, were down and trailing away from the bowsprit and jibboom. None of the other staysails was set. She was laden and laboring hard. It seemed that the swell must roll the sticks out of her.

From the height at which they stood Lavelle and Emily could see her lie down with every heave of the sea and put her lee rail under.

Now, for a second, rolling deeper than she had before, Lavelle, from a new angle, confirmed what he had suspected from the beginning. Her wheel was deserted! Her decks were lifeless! She was in charge of herself!

The bark was rapidly drifting closer. Another fifteen minutes, Lavelle figured, would carry her by the island half a mile to the southward. It was a moment for quick decision. Emily read his purpose to swim to the bark.

"God alone knows, Emily, what mystery confronts us. But our only chance of life lies out there. It may be another trap, comrade, but we must hope. I feel that, for your sake, I must——"

"For our sakes," she interrupted him, but he did not seem to hear her. He was bending over, removing his shoes.

Startled, eagerly he beheld the love-light in her eyes, only to turn quickly away. His heart throbbed as if it must burst. His tortured soul moaned in its yearning and passion to crush her to his breast. In the face of death he would have claimed her at this sign; gone out with his lips pressed to hers. In the face of life—the promise of living which the bark held forth—he, the pariah, said no to his desire.

His face was masked and cold as he turned toward her again, and the gold woman bent her head for shame. He broke out the boat mast and, carrying it over his shoulder, he held out his hand and led her swiftly down the hill. His hand was very cold. He set her a lookout point at the foot of the hill.

"Wait here," he said in a voice which sounded unlike him. "At no second lose sight of the bark. Be on your guard. If anything should happen to the island cling to this mast. It will keep you up. I'll come for you—I'll pick you up."

"And if—if," she said, "this should be good-by—and we should not meet again——"

Emily watched him as he dropped off the swaying land and struck out powerfully toward the bark now head on to the southern shore. For a moment her heart grew still with misgiving. Then, it thrilled with a joyous impulse. She hurried across the meadow. As she went she removed her long cloak and the golfing jacket. At the shore she stopped and tore the bandages from her feet. Looking seaward she saw where Lavelle swam. Dropping her skirt quickly she stood for a second in the long white night robe in which she had escaped the Cambodia. Inhaling a long, deep breath she plunged overboard fearlessly.

Lavelle, looking backward, missed Emily. His spirit slumped. He paused his stroke, fearful for her safety.

The sun at that moment burnished the crest of a wave behind him. A white arm clove its mane of foam and his heart leaped to behold the gold woman following in his wake.

CHAPTER XXII

The sight of this woman following after him held Paul Lavelle bound for the moment in the inertia of awe. All sense of their common and great peril left him. Wonder robbed him of the power of thinking just as it had on the island when she had drawn his head to her and pressed her lips upon his. He comprehended the thing by instinct alone.

With the powerful, sweeping overhead stroke of a practiced swimmer Emily overtook him on the crest of a foaming surge. The plaits of her hair had been washed by the sea into a free golden mane. The grace of a Nereid, of the ocean itself, was in her. She might have been borne of the deep. The myth of Thetis must have had such a conception.

As she swung up to him, shoulder to shoulder, Lavelle turned on his side. With a toss of her head she brought it clear of the water. The light of her countenance said to him as plainly as words could have done: "I am here! I am thine!" He caught her and drew her face to his. His lips went to hers and clung in a wild, fleeting second of union. Then, side by side, they struck out to meet their destiny.

Taking the weather berth, Paul set the pace toward the strange vessel. It was already to leeward of the island's median line. The send of the swell, however, more than balanced the craft's swift drift in the swimmers' favor. Yet the half-mile of their turbulent course was a test for the strongest and bravest. The willful, tenacious power of love sustained Emily until they came within hail of their goal. Here flesh and blood struck. Her spirit remained undaunted, but the body refused the spirit's demands upon it.

Sensing that Emily was failing, Lavelle put out a hand and turned her on her back. In that moment he realized, too, that he was near exhaustion. The ridge of a gigantic surge lifted them higher than the rail of the bark. Paul could distinguish every fixture of her deserted decks. The sea dropped away with them. The next instant the vessel's leaden-colored side and half of her copper-painted bottom were reeling over them. They might have been looking up at her from the bottom of the ocean. Her masts appeared to pierce the blue, sun-shot sky.

Although convinced there was no ear aboard the vessel to hear Paul drew on his rapidly waning strength to send a yell down to her. The sails flung back a faint, mocking echo. All the while his eyes were searching for some means of boarding. Being an iron vessel the bark's sides presented no chain plates or channels for a hand hold. Deeply laden though she was the bights in which her braces trailed were far beyond his reach even when she rolled.

The belief that he might be able to climb aboard with the aid of a lee brace had been with him when he took to the water. From the island it had seemed that this gear swept the sea with every surge. Not so much as an eyebolt offered a ray of hope. The boomkins were as possible of touching as the tops. He turned toward the bows. There might be a chance forward, but he felt certain that Emily's strength would never withstand the mauling of the sea that must follow catching hold of the bobstay.

Lost for a moment in the eagerness of his search, the bark had drifted down upon them until a stroke would have brought them together. The sensation of being drawn down made him aware of it. It shocked him into action. Dragging Emily with him, Paul plunged away just in time to escape a terrific suction produced by the vessel's laboring.

Hardly were they clear of this new peril, which he instantly realized must be taken into account, when something wound itself around Paul's legs with a jerk. It clung like the tentacle of a monster. It snatched him toward the vessel. The bark was lifting at the moment. He and Emily were falling away in a valley of beryl. Instinctively he threw himself on his back, kicking as best he could to free his prisoned limbs. A glance, as his feet came clear of the water, transported him from the depths of fear and hopelessness to the heights of hope. He was entangled in a rope's end which was attached to the bark. He caught it just as it was slipping away from him. Overhauling it with one hand he found it to be a gauntline which trailed away from a block at the end of the lee main yardarm. To his sailor mind it told how the vessel's small boats had been hoisted out of her.

It was with misgiving that he drew the line toward him. It came so freely that he was certain that it was but another mockery. At each pull he expected to see its length come darting through the block. Presently it held; it sustained his weight. It was fast aboard the vessel. His heart bounded at the discovery. He passed a bight round Emily's waist and darted from her side forward. Hurling himself into the smothering suction under the bows, he clutched the bobstay as it buried itself. Down he went with it, dragged further and further until it seemed that he must let the sea have him. A monster with an hundred beaks tore at his lungs. Another clawed at his eyes. Still another gnashed at his heart. A bare glimmer of consciousness marked the end of the downward pitch. As the bark rose he continued to climb. At the end of the rise he was clear of the sea and halfway to the cap of the bowsprit. The fangs which reached for him did not get him again.

Half an hour afterward Paul Lavelle found himself lying on a deck with water hissing over him and round him. It gurgled in his ears and foamed across his throat. It was being spat at him out of three or four scuppers and a bulwark port on his right. He was in the waist of a vessel. This was a hatch coaming against which his left side was pressed—the coaming of the vessel's main hatch. He sat up and saw Emily lying across the hatch unconscious. The bight of the gauntline was still around her. As he struggled to arise, only to fall back again, his cheek swept one of her feet which dangled over the edge of the coaming. Yes, he had torn that woman out of the sea's arms. There she was in evidence of that, but where he had found the strength, how he had done it or when he had done it, he had no idea.

The names Emily and Daphne were mixed in his thoughts. It took a severe mental struggle to identify his own name. He repeated it two or three times before he recognized it. Emily was the name of the woman on the hatch. But Daphne? This name puzzled him until his wandering gaze found a row of deck buckets in a rack on the edge of the forward house. Daphne was painted on each bucket. Then slowly it came to him that he had seen it on the bows of a vessel aboard which he had climbed a long time before.

His senses were bogged in the reaction of the despair of exhaustion—that hopeless dejection which follows a supreme mental or physical exertion and whose poignancy is the greater according to the successful degree of the effort. He slipped back to his full length in the water and lay staring up at the sky.

His name called in a plaintive tone over his head was what finally aroused him to a realization of his situation. The voice touched a chord in his being that impelled him to action. It sent a wave of emotion through him. He rose to a sitting posture. Again his cheek brushed the gold woman's feet, and at the touch he bent his head quickly and kissed them. It was not the first time he had done this, but it startled him now, for he sensed that she was conscious of what he did. Yet thus on the island he had kissed her reverently and sacredly when he had bound her burns.

As he struggled to his feet Emily sat up. Her hair fell across her shoulders and bosom and across her limbs in a golden shower.

This woman was his. She had challenged him against the sea—matched him against all its brute force—and he had won her.

For a second only Emily met and held Paul's glance. Then, lowering her head and throwing herself in abandon across the hatch, she burst into tears. So did the reaction of all she had passed through come upon her.

Paul turned away, chastened by those tears. He realized that no word he might utter then would assuage one drop of them. Action called to him, but he seemed to be unable to put a hand on the situation. A long weather roll caught him unawares. It flung him across the deck and he brought up against the fife rail around the mainmast. His limbs quivered under him; his knees knocked together in weakness. Every muscle of him throbbed and twitched from the effects of the battle he had waged with the sea. A momentary dread that he would never recover his strength seized him.

It was in that instant that his gaze snapped a glimpse of the island far up to windward. It appeared very small. He marveled that the bark could have drifted so far. A lee roll cut the bit of land from his view. He started to call Emily, but forbore at the sound of her sobbing. As if fascinated he waited until the bark lifted on the shoulder of the next swell. Like sugar melting in a teacup the island dissolved in his sight. It stirred him mightily. It aroused in him the spirit of combativeness. It made him realize that the sea would stand not on his dalliance. It ordered him to action and to confront the mystery of the ocean's traffic with the abandoned Daphne.

It required but a glance for him to confirm his estimate of the vessel's size which he had formed in his first view of her from the island and while he swam beside her. She was not less than 1,200 tons burden—about 200 feet long and less than forty feet beam—and heavily sparred. Her lower masts and topmasts were of iron or steel. They were pole masts; that is to say, in one continuous piece. The lower and double topsail-yards also were built of iron or steel. Everything bespoke the fact that she had been built for driving.

Calling to Emily that he would be gone but a minute, Paul drew an iron belaying pin from the fife rail and started aft. He armed himself against surprise, although he felt instinctively that he and Emily were alone. Still, all to be seen about decks indicated that the bark had not been long abandoned.

A teakwood door was open and hooked back against the cabin's forward bulkhead. A similar door on the starboard side was shut. Through the open door he entered the after-living quarters. A slamming of doors and the familiar sound of the hard woods in the cabin's trim, working in their joinings, answered the invader's hail flung from the threshold. Once inside, he found himself in a white-painted alleyway at the end of which a banging door gave him a glimpse of the forward cabin or saloon. His nostrils first caught a stench of lamps which had flickered out in oil dregs.

All ships are so ordered in their appointments that a seaman is never at a loss to find his way in any. Lavelle could have gone about the Daphne blindfolded. He did not have to look at the brass plate over the first door off the alleyway on his right to tell it was the room of the chief mate. The door was open, but something behind it kept it from swinging more than a couple of inches as the vessel labored. He gave it a quick shove and stepped inside the room, only to pause with a gasp of horror.

At the invader's feet, bathed in the morning sunlight which poured through two ports, lay the stark body of a young, lithe-limbed son of the sea. Barely more than a boy he had been. There was a gaping bullet wound between his eyes. It was a wound of exit—where the lead which had killed him had sped away from its work. It cried out a story of assassination to Lavelle; it shrieked to him that the young fellow had been shot from behind, possibly as he slept in his berth with his back toward the door. The rolling of the ship had brought the body to the deck where it lay.

The lockers of the room were wrenched open. Everywhere were signs of disorder; the marks of hurrying, marauding hands. Yet the room had been the castle of a man of order and cleanliness. Lavelle looked particularly for the bark's log book which ordinarily should have been on the small desk at the foot of the berth. It was missing.

With a thought of how sweet life must have been to this young fellow and with his wrath hot against his slayers, Lavelle stepped across the alleyway to the second and third mates' room. Its door opened at a touch. Here, strangely, the sour, unmistakable odor of the forecastle met him. Instantly the searcher visualized the coarse type of men who had occupied these quarters—the rule-of-thumb sort, who may spend a lifetime at sea without ever winning to a rank above second mate. Here disorder was not apparent because disorder was a natural thing.

There was a stateroom abaft the mate's. It was empty. A door immediately opposite had been forced. It was another stateroom filled with stores. It was plain that a quick draft had been made upon these supplies.

Darting into the forward cabin, only the echo of his own hail answered him. A red tablecloth lay on the deck where it had been swept by some person hurrying by or else in a struggle. A white metal castor rolled under the dining table and made a tinkling noise among its broken cruets. The pantry and three more staterooms opened upon this cabin. The staterooms reported only emptiness. They had not been recently occupied. The pantry's cleanliness and order might have been produced by a careful housewife's hands.

The doors leading into the after cabin were open and hooked back. Like the forward compartment, it was done in Indian teak, bird's-eye maple, and mahogany. It was furnished with two comfortable easy chairs, a small center table, and a divan built into the bulkhead against the starboard side. A tiny piano stood between the forward entrances. Through the after end a companionway led up on to the poop.

There were two more staterooms here. They were empty and gave no signs of recent occupancy. They were on the port side. To starboard was the chart room. A litter of books, charts, and chart pipes covered its floor. The chronometer case stood open. A glance told Paul that it had been wound within forty-eight hours. He bent his head and quickly caught a tick of even, smooth escapement.

Hurrying aft from the chart room, the castaway came to what he knew to be the skipper's room. The door to it was shut. Its middle panel was splintered. Something made him turn the knob with gentleness.

Just inside the door to the left a man in pajamas sat at a small writing desk, his head cast upon his arms as if sleep had suddenly overtaken him. His head swayed as Paul looked down at him. It was lending itself to the swing of the vessel, but the motion was so natural that, for the moment, Lavelle was deceived. A strange hope sprang into his heart.

"Wake up, old man! Wake up!" he called. He even shook him by the shoulder, but the man at the desk was sleeping a sleep that knows no mortal awakening.

Under the stiff arms Paul spied the log book which he had missed from the mate's room. He pulled it out and the dead man's head rolled back and compelled his disturber to meet the gaze of his wide-open, staring blue eyes. A pen rolled out from under his right hand and dropped from the desk.

This undoubtedly was the Daphne's skipper. He had been a man of powerful build, standing in life as tall as Lavelle himself. Even in the laxness of death his jaw bespoke indomitable determination. The nose was of a splendid aggressive type. Death had taken him in the beginning of his best years. He could not have been more than forty years of age.

A crimson splotch just below the chest line told where the man's life blood had gone out. Measuring its location by sight with the height of the door's splintered panel, Lavelle ventured a deduction of how the Daphne's master and mate had been assassinated. The master had been asleep or, at any rate, he had retired. His apparel, his disturbed berth told that. He had heard the shot which did for the mate, or, perhaps, he might have gone to the door unsuspectingly to answer a knock or summons. His hand turning the knob had been the signal to the assassin on the other side of the door to send a bullet crashing through it into his midriff.

But how the skipper had come to have the log book in his room it was not possible to surmise unless, after being shot, he had had the strength to make his way to the mate's room and back again. Again he might have taken the keeping of the log into his own charge. Could he and the mate have quarreled? Asking himself this question, the searcher's eyes ran down the pages at which the book had lain open and stopped with a shock at three words:

It was written in a hand which had begun the formation of the letters in a tight style and ended in the scrawling of a schoolboy, a blot and a splattered dash. Where this dash finished there had death touched the fingers which held the writer's pen.

Whatever had happened aboard the Daphne it was the second mate who was responsible for it. Paul was convinced there was no escape from the indictment in those three words.

It was a P.M. entry under date of March 29. According to Paul Lavelle's account of time it was now March 31. Some time during the night of two days before—on the 29th—mutiny had lifted its red hands on the Daphne.

The log was written up to eight o'clock on the evening of the 29th. It must have been the last thing the fair-haired boy now lying cold forward had done before turning his lamp down for his eternal "watch below."

But as startling as was the tragedy which loomed so boldly out of the three simple words which have been quoted was the Daphne's position given as of noon of that day: "Latitude 32:30 north; Longitude 176:28 east."

This instantly destroyed Paul's idea of the island's position. The bark had drifted up on the island out of the southwest. Then, according to the most reasonable assumption, she had been to the southward of it when she was abandoned. That put the island between three and four hundred miles to the northward of where the castaways had believed it to be all the time. Its drift must have been to the north and east instead of the southwest. This explained the absence of the trades; the variable quality of the winds which had prevailed. The island had drifted across the spot, or within a short distance thereto, of where the Cambodia had found her grave.

Paul decided to let the observation which he planned to make at noon settle the puzzle of position. The moment demanded that he should give his thoughts to it and the living, and not to the past and its dead. Still as he laid the log down on the desk again he turned to the page which began it and read, in the style of the ancient sea formula:

"Log of the bark Daphne, 1,252 tons burthen, of Liverpool, England, John McGavock, master, on her voyage from Sydney, N. S. W., toward San Francisco, U. S. A."

And with something of boyish pride the keeper of the log—it was not in the skipper's writing—had posted his name with boldness at the head of the list of the ship's company: "William Elston, chief officer." It was the imagination of youth gilding the rank. It seemed to speak that the Daphne had given the boy his first berth as mate.

"And they murdered you, William Elston, and you, too, John McGavock," said Paul with a sad bitterness, turning away from the desk.

A frightened cry from Emily, a smothered sob and the patter of her bare feet carried Paul through the open door, but not quickly enough to cut off her view of the still occupant of the skipper's room. She shrank into his arms shuddering, and as he pressed her to him she tried to crush her sobs against his breast.

"Don't be frightened—don't be frightened, dearheart," he crooned to her. His lips found her brow, her eyes, her mouth.

"I—I——Oh, Paul, I thought you had gone—away," she sobbed. "You were—were so long."

Paul had not been away from the deck more than five minutes, but the time had seemed to her thrice and thrice again as long.

Brokenly she told him how, as she had entered the door through which she had seen him disappear, her eyes had found the figure of the mate stretched in his room.

"Then—there is another—one—in there!" she went on. "Oh, Paul, never leave me again! Will you, dear! Will you? Not until death comes to take us both?"

"No, dear; not until death," he answered her pleading, but the kiss which he pressed on her mouth spoke in greater reassurance to her heart than his words. "Much has happened here—much that I don't understand; much that we may never understand. But just now we must think of ourselves. We must think of living; of fighting on. You're going to fight on with me, aren't you? You're going to be brave and never lose hope? You don't know how brave you've been. You have been the inspiration of the battle all along. Look up at me."

"It is not hard to be brave with you," she said, and he drew her to him so fiercely that she could not help crying out.

"No, no," she protested with a smile of love, but her eyes sought a red mark on her round, gleaming shoulder, and for the first time each of them became conscious of the meagerness of her attire.

"No, no, Paul. It happened when you were dragging me over the side. The rope did it."

As she spoke she drew the yoke of her long white gown higher on her shoulders. Her cheeks mantled red with shame and he turned away from her. Yet in the next instant her cheeks crimsoned a deeper hue in shame of that shame, for it came to her as a truth that in the sight of this man there could be no abasement.

Paul reëntered the skipper's room, remembering that he had seen an ulster and a mackintosh hanging in a corner to the right of the desk. He swept them on to his arm in his bewilderment. It was one thing to outfit a man; another to garb a woman. His eye caught a pair of socks hanging over the edge of a half-open drawer under McGavock's berth. He snatched these. He added a pair of straw sandals, whose toes protruded from under the settee across the rear bulkhead, to his collection and also a blanket—a fine white California blanket which lay in a roll at the foot of the berth. It was the best he could think of doing at the moment.

"Lie down there, dear," he said, "and I'll tuck you in and bring you some coffee—something warm, anyway—and some food."

"No, no, no," she said, starting up. "Don't leave me here—alone. Not now. I know the dead can't hurt one, but—I must go with you. When all's said and done, Paul—I'm only—only a woman——"

She took the ulster from him and slipped it on. It was large enough to have wrapped her round twice. She plunged her feet into the warm woollen socks and gave a little sigh of pleasure.

Paul handed her the sandals, and as she took them she studied them for a second, only to glance up at him with a startled expression.

"A woman? A woman?" he repeated, and he wondered if here was the key of the mystery of the Daphne.

CHAPTER XXIII

Together the castaways went forward to the galley, passing out of the cabin through the starboard alleyway so that Emily might not see again what was in the mate's room. As Paul stepped out on deck he mentally marked the time by the sun's ascension. It was not later than 8:30 o'clock.

Signs of hurried departure met the eye on every hand in the galley. Chief among them was a batch of bread which had been put to rising beside the range. But Paul did not pause to make any examination until he had rattled up a fire. He had picked up a box of matches in McGavock's room. There was a bin of kindling and plenty of coal in the scuttles, and it took only a few minutes to get a meal together. It was the warmest and best breakfast they had enjoyed since they had been cast away, albeit the mainstay was a porridge of canned corn which Paul had hit upon as the most promising thing in a quick search of the stores aft. For the rest there was hard tack and marmalade and coffee. This coffee, a strong brew, was really the crown of the breakfast. Its very odor was life-giving; strength-restoring.

Over the breakfast Paul related with all the gentleness at his command the facts which had been revealed by his search through the cabins. There was little to add to what Emily had seen herself.

Fearful that similar heart-harrowing sights might be held by the forward part of the vessel as those which the sore-beset girl had discovered aft he induced her to remain in the warmth of the galley while he pressed his search in the forecastle.

"Don't—please don't stay long," she pleaded. "I feel—that—that I will never be able to bear it—to have you go out of my sight again." A shudder shook her. "When I saw you—a little while ago——Oh, the ship fell on you! The bows came down and—buried you in the water——"

"There, there, dear. Let us never think of it again. I have only a glimmer of an idea—of what happened. I don't know what happened; in fact, I don't want to know. All I do know and all I care about is—that somehow I had the sand—the brute strength to save you. Just you of all the world!"

He seized her passionately as he spoke and kissed her. The pressure of her firm, lithe body against his sent his blood clamoring. The natural perfume of her hair made his brain hammer drunkenly. Still above the tumult which beset his senses rang a mocking laugh—a devil's laugh. As he caught it a chill went over him. He put Emily away from him as fiercely as he had taken her and, crying, without a word, she sank on the bench in front of the fire and hid her face in her hands. As he turned away his brow was clouded with anger; his eyes filled with bitterness.

A second Lavelle stood motionless, his trembling breath an unuttered curse of himself. Then he turned to the door at his side and banged it open. It was the entrance to the cook's cubby-hole of a room. A piece of matting and a wooden pillow in the bunk told that its late occupant had been either a Chinese or Japanese. There was an odor, too, that bespoke the recent presence of an opium smoker. He had departed in a hurry.

There was another door leading aft from the galley. This was the entrance to the carpenter shop and donkey engine room. A cubby-hole with a bunk in it to port had been the carpenter's abode. Lavelle noted with satisfaction the equipment of glistening, well-kept tools on the engine room bulkheads.

Hurrying forward, Paul entered the forecastle. It was an exceptionally large one for a vessel of the Daphne's size. Echo answered his hail. Mattresses—the straw pallets which sailors call "donkeys' breakfasts"—clothes' bags, ditty bags, oilskins, sea boots, sou'westers, an assortment of greasy pots, pannikins, and spoons, and two filthy kids littered the black deck. Half a dozen chests gaped open, their contents falling over their sides. The hands that had gone through them had sought only the bottoms where money, trinkets, and supposed valuables had been hidden by their owners. So had he found the chests in the rooms of the second and third mates, the carpenter, and the cook. In their extremity they had all acted alike—thought only of useless baubles and left useful, necessary things behind.

A sailor before the mast, used and inured to hardship, living by the hour hand in hand with death, trained in the expectancy of sudden danger, ever aware of the constant attendance of peril, might be expected to act with more intelligence in an emergency which may cost him his life than the humdrum-going citizen ashore. Left to himself, he will go out of a ship in mid-ocean with a few shillings he has stored in the bottom of his bag or chest, a model upon which he has been spending most of his watches below, a derby hat or flash necktie for which he paid four times too much at his last port. Rarely has he a thought of necessary things—the countless useful articles of clothing such as Paul Lavelle saw on every hand—overcoats, jackets, underclothing—which a day or an hour in an open boat can make worth a king's ransom.

The forecastle had been emptied in a hurry, but it told no other tale than that. There is no lair of mankind, no habitation of man's devisement more cheerless than a ship's forecastle. There is no sight more depressing, more dismal than one deserted.

Paul, with a shudder, crossed from the starboard side, through which he had entered, to port. The breath of fresh air which he caught as he threw back the door and stepped out on deck was like a draught of wine. His spirits lifted as it dissipated the sea-sour stench which his nostrils were carrying. He turned forward immediately to at last come upon an explanation of the exodus from the Daphne.

The fore hatch was open. The covers were strewn about the deck. Up out of the glistening cargo of coals came an odor of fire. There was no smoke, but fire had been or was down there.

He recognized the dangerous quality of the coals at once. It was fear of it that had emptied the crew overside in panic. His mind, in the stress which had been upon it while he was aft, had not grasped the probable character of the cargo when he read in the log book with what the Daphne was laden.

Dropping down through the hatchway his bare feet felt no heat. None of the signs of "trouble" which he knew so well was present. He had fought cargoes like this one.

All was cool below; not the faintest indication of gas. But still there was an odor of fire. He crawled out into the wings, and as he did so his eyes became accustomed to the semi-darkness. Thus by sight he located the source of the baffling fire smell. It was under the deck just forward of the hatch—a heap of ashes burned from all sorts of old junk. Mattresses had made part of the fire.

Not two feet away from where the fire had burned most briskly lay a five-gallon tin of kerosene on its side. The arsonist who had carried it there either had lost his nerve at the end and been afraid to open its cock, or else he had depended upon it to explode.

Still this fire which had been set with the intention of destroying the Daphne had made much smoke and burned out impotently. The deck above it was only slightly charred.

Paul raked through the ashes feverishly. The coal underneath was as cool to the touch as it was elsewhere. Not more than a handful of it was blistered.

When he drew himself up on deck again he hauled a couple of buckets of water from over the side and threw it on the spot where the fire had burned as a matter of extraordinary precaution. Nor did he forget to bring the kerosene out of the hold.

Emily met him with a smile of gladness, which immediately turned into a laugh of humor as Paul stepped into the galley again.

He paused a second to survey himself. He indeed was a sorry sight. The thin tattered shirt and the trousers which he had slashed off at the knees when he struck out from the island still clung to him damply. His limbs were black with coal dust.

"I can imagine the color of my face," said he, and he rubbed the stubble of beard on his cheeks. "But never mind my appearance—only pour me a cup of that strong coffee."

"We're all alone, partner—just us. A fire panic emptied the vessel—a fire which the murderers of the skipper and chief mate believed would destroy the ship and the evidence of their crimes. The ship's laden with Australian coals—a treacherous cargo. Knowing its dangerous character, it is easy for me to understand what the first flash of smoke meant to the minds of the sort of gang for'ard. They believed the cargo was afire. With those in authority plying them with fear and not a voice to steady them, they must have gone over the side like rats. The more haste that marked their going the better were the plans of the ringleaders suited. I cannot help believing that what happened aft was known to only a few—the second mate and perhaps the third. Yet how was it explained to those outside of the secret of the assassinations—the absence of the skipper and chief mate? The ringleaders could have reported them as dead without explaining what had killed them. They could have reported them to have killed each other. They could have reported them as having fallen overboard. They could have told the others even that the men had been murdered, without giving any proof against themselves. But I must have done with this conjecturing. It is idle."

"Chi risponde presto, sa poco. That is as the Italians have it: Who answers suddenly knows little. The fact that they took provisions and the three boats which the empty chocks show to have been in the bark seems convincing that they did not flee to another ship. Perhaps they believed they were near some land."

"Maybe another island—a trap like ours? I looked for our island—out there——It is gone."

"I am thinking of a woman's presence in the mystery. The French say there is always a woman."

He spoke with an attempt at lightness which he was far from feeling. A wince of unpleasantness indicated his true thoughts.

"Do you agree with the French adage?" Emily asked. An enigmatical smile played across her face as she put the question.

"There is always one woman—one woman out of all the world," he answered. His tone thrilled her. He studied her for a second mysteriously. "You are very wonderful to me," he added, but his voice was so low that it seemed that the thought back of it forced itself to unconscious utterance. She met his gaze frankly; the unconcealed light of love was in her eyes.

Paul turned away from her abruptly and a chill came into her heart. She saw the old expression of pain in his face—the expression she had beheld there the day she had seen him first in the steamship agency in Yokohama. It always came so unexpectedly.

Looking out of the galley door to windward, Paul saw a clear sky. The breeze from the southwest held steady at about six or seven knots. All overhead signs promised fine weather, but the swell was ominous. Still all the indications were that it was the aftermath of a storm which had passed far to the westward.

"You're the chief mate of the Daphne now," he said, facing her again, "and it's your watch below. You slept but little last night, you know."

"You will help best by obeying orders, little woman. The first rule of the sea is obedience. Come."

Paul started aft and Emily followed him in silence. She who had never known mastership in her life went whither this man led and with no thought of doing otherwise. He handed her up on the poop over the weather gangway.

It was an exceptionally long quarter deck for a vessel of the Daphne's size. Abaft the mizzenmast and the saloon skylights stood a small teakwood deck house comfortably furnished as a sort of lounge. It was lighted by four large ports. Through the center of this house the after companionway led below. On each fore and aft side was a leather cushioned bench or divan, both long and wide enough to afford good berths on which to steal a sleep and at the same time remain within quick access of the deck. Against the forward bulkhead was a collapsible chart table. The deck entrance opened on the steering compass and the wheel. Running forward on each side of the vessel from the break of the poop to the forward house were two pipe-railed bridges. Similar bridges connected the forward house with the forecastle head. One might cover the length of the ship from the mizzenmast to the eyes of her without putting a foot on the main deck. Halfway between the mizzen and mainmasts the bridges were connected by a platform on which stood the standard compass.

It was in the companionway deck house or lounge, as the castaways came to call it, that Paul spread a berth for Emily with some blankets which he took from one of the staterooms. Although she protested that she would find it easy to remain awake if she could drink as much coffee as he had—that she really wasn't sleepy—her head had hardly touched its clean white pillow when her eyelids closed fast in a deep slumber. Sheer will power had been keeping her up.

There was grim work ahead of Paul Lavelle and he hurried to do it. It must be finished when Emily awoke. Before entering the cabin, however, he went forward and put a fire under the donkey boiler. Here was an auxiliary crew—this engine—a good thirty horsepower at least. Hope mounted in his breast as he examined it and found it in first-class condition. For that matter, everything about the Daphne was strong and good. She had been "kept up" is the way Lavelle would have described her to another seaman.

A plan of action which he had been formulating he now confirmed. He would let the Daphne lie along hove to as she was until he could fix her position and then, from that point attempt to work her, with Emily's aid and the engine's, into a frequented track of vessels. Having made such a track, he would hold on there the while he did his best to make the nearest land. If what the bark's log said were true it would not be long, the gods of the winds being kind, before they were in the track in which the Cambodia had been lost.

Thoroughly this man realized the seriousness of the situation which confronted him. Before him was a task to give any man pause—a twelve-hundred-ton bark at the mercy of the sea to be handled by himself, a woman, and a donkey engine. There was no alternative to the plan his mind had outlined. While he tested it from every angle, instinct led him to many necessary small tasks. He sounded the ship's well. There was no telling how much water might have entered her through the open fore hatch. The rod came back as dry as a bleached bone. It had not even rained since she had been abandoned. This suggested examining her fresh-water supply. He sounded these tanks. They held a supply for fifty days even if the bark had been manned by her full complement. Besides, the donkey engine had a condenser attachment for its own purposes and also for ship use in the event of a shortage.

Paul Lavelle had never been aboard a handier vessel than the Daphne. John McGavock and her young chief mate must have been very proud of her. She was molded on clipper lines. In her heyday undoubtedly, judging from the size of her mizzenmast, she had been rigged as a ship. That day had been when the taunt, white-winged tea clippers were the mail carriers and passenger greyhounds of the seas; and the men who mastered them veritable nabobs of the deep. The lounge on the Daphne's poop, the rich India teak and mahogany and bird's-eye maple of her commodious saloons, the many staterooms, the appointments of her large galley bespoke her as having been not among the least of these fliers. Certainly she must have been a flash packet in the days of her youth when she could have mustered twenty-five men in a watch to fist a topsail. Paul knew that vessels like this had carried tremendous crews—sometimes fifty, sixty, and seventy-five, idlers and all—in the days of their pride when an hour cut from a passage meant gold for owners and masters. His mother's father had been master and afterward owner of such ships as the Daphne. But he had sailed them under a different flag than hers—a flag which had driven him, the grandson, away from it and to be a marked wanderer.

This unpleasant personal thought turned Lavelle aft. He entered the cabin through the door on the starboard side. Here he found three more staterooms, which opened off an alleyway similar to the one on the opposite side. These rooms had been long given up to storage purposes. One was filled with barrels of flour and biscuits; the others held cordage and bolts of untouched canvas. He carried away a bolt of the newest, whitest duck and a coil of marlin.

No tenderer hands could have given the Daphne's master and mate to the sea; no voice could have bespoken their souls a kinder journey than the stranger who shrouded and weighted them. He sent them away with a prayer and a heartfelt farewell that a friend who had known them and loved them a lifetime might have breathed.

Paul was near breaking down when it came to the parting with William Elston. Among the papers scattered around the lad he found the first page of a letter which the boy had started to his mother on the day after the Daphne had put out from Sydney. That was the day after Christmas.

"I'll be home in England—merry England—with you next Christmas, mother mine——"

That was as much as he could read. He put the crumpled sheet in the dead boy's hands where he had already folded a photograph which had hung over the berth. It was a picture of a simple vine-covered cottage such as are to be met in the byways of villages and towns throughout England. Clusters of roses peeped and seemed to nod over a hawthorn hedge in the foreground. A collie stood at the gate, head lifted, ears cocked, and muzzle searching the distance as at a master's coming. On the back of the photograph was written in the hand which had kept the log: "My Sussex Home.

"'In a fair ground—in a fair ground—
Yea, Sussex by the sea!'"

While the mystery which Paul met at every turn beckoned him on in pursuit of it, he was careful to guard against giving any time except to necessary things. He was compelled to give his attention to the donkey boiler and galley fires forward as well as keep an eye on the sun's ascension toward noon. The Daphne's position was the most important thing to be ascertained. To this end he searched high and low for a sextant. The mate's was missing; the skipper's, too. He found McGavock's empty case in a corner of the chart room, where it had been thrown and smashed. A mercurial barometer lay crushed beside it. Nor could he discover the sailing chart of the bark's present voyage nor any other chart of the Pacific.

Abaft the companionway staircase he came upon a room which had escaped his attention before. It opened upon a short alleyway into the lazarette. Here were stowed the ship's slop stores. A door on the left hand, as one went aft, led into the skipper's room. He had noticed it when he had returned to get the ulster for Emily. Immediately opposite was the entrance to a snug bathroom.

Paul took advantage immediately of his discovery of the slop stores to levy upon them for an outfit of clothing and shoes. When he had found how plentiful was the vessel's supply of water he had vanquished the dust and grime of his venture into the fore hold. The touch of the fresh clothing, rough though it was, was pleasant. It was a link with the world again.

The while he dressed in the bathroom he observed many things which told of a woman's presence—articles of the toilet too fine and dainty for a man's use. A leather traveling dressing case lay on a small stand. It contained a silver-mounted assortment of brushes and screw-top bottles. He paused to examine them for a marking. There was none but the English Sterling impression. Another thing which indicated to him that this room had known a woman's presence was a tiny fern basket which swung over the bath. Similar baskets hung in the skylight of each saloon and from the ceiling in the skipper's room. These meant a woman's watchfulness and tender care. Men who live and die by the sea know no green-growing things; no flowers. The sea gives no flowers to its children; no sweet odors for memory. It has gardens, but they are scentless and one may enter them only when life is done. So perhaps it is just as well that its flora is without fragrance.

At one moment Paul was convinced that a woman had been in the Daphne but recently: the next he doubted it. He did not wish to think that she had been carried off in those small boats. The thought sickened him.

He crossed from the bath into the skipper's room again, hoping that he might have overlooked there some place where a sextant or quadrant might be stored. Alongside the desk he spied a silver frame. It contained the photograph of a laughing, blonde-headed girl of not more than two and twenty—an wholesome English type of face; just such a woman as he imagined a man like McGavock would go a-wooing and take to wife. He regretted that he had not found it sooner. John McGavock might have wished to take it with him. Paul set it on top of the desk again, from which it had evidently been knocked, and turned away cudgeling his brain to suggest where he might carry his search. His glance picked up a knobless door in the bulkhead to the right of the desk. He dimly remembered noticing it when he had taken the mackintosh and of fixing it in his mind at the time as the vessel's medicine chest. It was fastened with a spring lock. He stepped back from it, hesitated a second, and with a heave of his shoulder burst it in.

An odorous wave of English lavender rolled out upon him. The man closed his eyes and inhaled the sweet freshness with a lingering breath. It conjured memories of mother, sister, home, boyhood—all the tender recollections of the days which had known no clouds; no bitternesses.

The room which the door revealed was half filled with a woman's skirts and gowns and coats hanging in order from the beams overhead. Along a shelf against the forward side stood a neat row of six or seven pairs of shoes and slippers. The drooping tops of some of them suggested little soldiers grown tired of marching. The invader felt as if he had broken into a holy place. A cedar-wood chest stood open on his left. On top of a filmy heap of woman's things lay a Leghorn straw, trimmed with a wreath of faded red silk roses. Across the hat was a baby's dainty underslip.

Turning away from the chest with a pang in his heart and a tightening at the throat latch his eyes found the object of his search. A sextant lay on top of the medicine chest which was built into the vessel's side. As he picked it up eagerly and examined it, he discovered two new chart pipes standing in the corner. In one of these was a new Admiralty chart of the North and South Pacific Oceans.

Carrying the pipes and the sextant, Paul Lavelle backed out of the little room, and as he went he could not help feeling that he had violated a shrine.

CHAPTER XXIV

Warned of a sudden that the sun was near the zenith, Paul hastened from the engine room aft. Although he tried to go softly when he reached the poop for fear of waking Emily he could not control the heels nor the squeaking of his new slop chest shoes. He heard her calling him before he was halfway to the wheel.

As he appeared in the lounge door she sat up in dumb fear. For the moment she did not recognize him in the rough blue shirt and corduroys and strange cap into which he had changed.

"Oh, Paul—Paul," she sobbed hysterically and covering her face as if to shut something unpleasant away from her. "I—I have had such—such a horrible dream. I——"

"There, there," he said comfortingly and going in to her. She caught hold of his hand. "Everything's going to come out all right. You know you've been through an awful drive. If——I'm sorry I woke you. Try to go back to sleep for another hour."

"I couldn't—I couldn't. I was dreaming that—that you were out there in the sea and that the ship was falling on you—pressing you down, down, down! It isn't true! It isn't true!"

Her voice rose nearly to a shriek in her effort to reassure herself. He had won to his old control of himself.

"No, no, it isn't true. Now listen: We're playing a big, big game here. You're my partner. The only one I can depend on——"

"Forgive me—I don't mean to be selfish or thoughtless or whimpery—or the clinging-vine sort."

"It's all right. All right, partner. It's a wonder you've a nerve left. There are mighty few men who could have come through what you have and not be folded up now. But I want you to think of this game. It's so big, so big, that it's worth winning!" His tone, his expression, brought a smile of interest into her face. "If you think you can't sleep I want you to go down below and get into a heavy shirt like mine—the strongest, heaviest clothes you can find. I've pulled a lot out of the slop chest—socks and things. Then, there's a little room—you'll find it in a corner of the skipper's. It's filled with a lot of woman's things. There's a cedar-wood chest——You will know what to take."

"All I can say is that the Daphne has known a woman's presence. When she was here—what has become of her—God knows."

"Before I slept I said a prayer for her. And every time I lie down to rest I will pray for her safety."

"It's all right. There is nobody down there now. We're absolutely alone," Paul said, noting her trepidation. "'Home is the sailor, home from the sea, And the hunter home from the hill.'"

Peace came to her spirit at the gentleness of his words and she went below unafraid.

By the noon sights which the Daphne's new master got he fixed her position as Latitude 33:18 north; Longitude, 177:20 east. It astounded him. He worked his calculations over and over again according to a half-dozen different formulæ. The result was the same, except for an unappreciable difference in longitude. So he made it 12 o'clock, setting the local time by an old-fashioned silver watch which he had discovered under the pillow in Elston's berth.

Assuming the correctness of his reckoning, the Daphne was approximately two hundred miles north and west of where the Cambodia had gone down. In the light of this he had to accept it as a fact that the island had drifted across the steamship lane. On the 29th the Daphne had been in Latitude 32:30 and Longitude 176:28. He visualized that day on the island. There had been a light breeze from sunrise to sunset out of the northeast. With the going down of the sun it had begun to veer through the north until it brought out of the southwest. Hove to on the port tack, the bark most have followed the hauling breeze until she had circled the island and then drifted up on it with the swell. It was the only satisfactory solution of which Paul could think.

There came to him now, with redoubled force, a thought which had formed in the instant he had read in the log the port of the vessel's departure and her destination: "What can have caused a ship bound from Sydney, New South Wales, toward San Francisco, to be steered so far to the westward?"

During the half-hour preceding noon the swell had gone down considerably. The breeze still continued steady from the southwest. An aneroid barometer which he had discovered in the lounge, when he had spread Emily's berth there, stood at an ordinary normal height. So he decided to hold on as the bark lay until after luncheon, then get under way, run before the wind for two hours, and take another altitude.

As Paul turned away from the barometer hanging over the chart table, Emily came up through the companionway. She wore a heavy blue flannel shirt such as he had told her to put on and a blue walking skirt which came to the tops of a pair of tan tennis shoes. She had plaited her hair again and wound it round her head like a crown. The shirt was unbuttoned at the throat, the cuffs rolled back. She presented a figure of beautiful, efficient womanhood where she paused at the head of the companionway, her arms half raised as if seeking Paul's approbation. Never since the first day he had seen her had she seemed so strongly feminine.

"You are the——" There he broke an exclamation. He halted in the step which he had taken toward her. Emily waited, her eyes half lowered. When his voice broke she looked up in surprise. She was pale, despite the soft tan with which exposure had dusted her face and throat. With an embarrassed laugh Paul went on: "You would make gunny cloth seem like the finest silk. Never ship sailed the seas with such a chief mate."

It was a disingenuous, awkward speech. Ill at ease he hurried on to tell her of the Daphne's position by the observations he had just made; of the plans he had formed. All the while he talked, a thought, which had been with him ever since the moment of madness in the galley and which had lashed him all through the morning, sprinkled salt on the wounds in his conscience.

"I felt as if I were committing a sacrilege when I went into the little room where the cedar chest is," Emily told him as they went forward to prepare luncheon. "The chest is filled with a girl's wedding things. The hat—the baby slip—I laid them away carefully and shut the lid on them."

She looked at the sea with a shudder. Paul noticed this and realized that he must fight, too, to keep his companion's mind on pleasant things. He quickly directed her thoughts to the future, explaining the division of labor that must be theirs and the vigilance they must keep to win a triumph of the sea. Her interest was enlisted more easily than he imagined it would be, for her thoughts were busy with a future which was calling her in all the beauty of life.

Emily insisted upon preparing the luncheon, permitting Paul only to shake up the fire. She did it well and, the while she was about it, he took the opportunity to reëxamine the Daphne's log. He hoped to glean from it some things which might aid him in the navigation of the bark. It served, however, only to deepen the mystery.

It was a clean record of routine for two weeks after the departure from Sydney. The crew had been received aboard on Christmas night. It was not hard to visualize the condition of the lot on such a day—the sorriest day in the year for an outward-bound. The following morning she had sailed—three months and eight days gone, or, as Elston had written at noon of the 29th: "Our 96th day at sea from Sydney." This was the 98th day.

The first thing to seize Paul's professional eye importantly was the absence of any designation of second or third mate. If the Daphne had sailed without these officers then they must have been recruited afterward from the forecastle gang. There was no telling from the names of the sixteen members of the crew who these might have been. The list comprehended every nationality under the sun.

At the end of the first two weeks three pages had been torn from the book. A week later another page was missing. There was not a week of the entire ninety-six days up to the hour of abandonment which was complete. Of course, it was plain to Lavelle that the man or men who had defaced the book had done so to destroy something that had been written against him or them.

"But why not have hove the book overboard and been done with it?" Paul asked himself. He could not answer the question.

The Daphne had spoken no other vessels; sighted no sail so far as the log disclosed. Fair weather had attended her to the equator, which she had crossed on the fiftieth day out with a proper casting—Longitude 119 west. This was in the track made by sailing vessels bound from Australia to the west coast of the United States. Then had followed calms until she had fallen in with the northeast trades in Latitude 8 north, but there was no word to explain why she thereafterward had been steered into this western sea more than two thousand miles off the course she should have held!

Emily's summons to luncheon made Paul lay aside the log. It was a surprisingly good and substantial meal that she had whipped together. While they ate Paul undertook the gold woman's drilling in the details of working a ship. On the island he and Chang had filled in many a dreary minute with talk of ships. Chang had taught her how to box the compass, and she was proud now, indeed, to exhibit this knowledge—eager to put it to use. Her experience in the boat had taught her much, too. She surprised Paul and made him proud of the intelligence with which she was able to comprehend his explanations.

"You're bully!" he exclaimed finally in admiration. "You're a woman with an efficient brain."

This little speech made Emily glow with happiness. She had had many a pretty compliment addressed to her by artists at that game, but never one which gave her this pleasure. Somehow she felt that thus he would have spoken to another man whose work he wished to praise. She understood that Paul Lavelle held order and efficiency above everything else. She was efficient in his sight. She fairly ran when he gave her the word to go aft and stand by the wheel.

The donkey boiler had made a full head of steam half an hour before. Now Paul started the engine which was connected with two hoisting drums protruding from each side of the forward house. He hoisted and hauled with these drums—set an additional headsail, and hauled his main yards round. Within ten minutes he had the Daphne bearing away to the northward with the wind over her port quarter. He ran aft and by hand swayed up the peak of the spanker as best he could. Next he set the patent log which was trailing over the stern.

Pausing to note the effect of the spanker he there and then stored in his memory the fact that with the peak down and a slight lee helm the Daphne, with the canvas she was now carrying, would practically take care of herself hove to in a light breeze.

When he looked over Emily's shoulder at the compass he could hear her heart beating wildly.

"Northeast by north, half north," she answered accurately and with a sharp intake of the breath.

All the gold woman could do was nod that she heard. The power of speech seemed to have gone from her. Awe of the big fabric of iron and canvas and web upon web of ropes and gear obeying the impulse of her small hands was upon her. It was a big game. It was a terrific, intoxicating, joyous sensation. She had but one distinct thought: That was to go sailing on in the Daphne—just she and this man alone—forever and ever. All the years of her past faded away—the moment obliterated their insignificance. Her eyes, alight with love, went seeking the man's face and found him turned away from her, entering the lounge.

"Rouse me at the slightest weather change—in two hours anyway," he called from within.

"I will," she managed to answer in a voice that seemed to belong to somebody else. She was trembling from head to foot with wonder—wonder of new strange forces clamoring through her being. The one thought which her comprehension dragged out of the riot and held was that this man through whom and by whom she lived trusted her so that he was lying down to sleep in her keeping; that he was depending upon her. Her woman's soul cried out in the pride of possession.

CHAPTER XXV

A violent ringing of the ship's bell and Emily calling him in a voice fraught with excitement aroused Paul. For a second he imagined he was still dreaming.

"Oh!" Emily gasped in relief. "I thought you would never wake. But look!" She pointed forward. "A boat's there! Right ahead! A man——There!"

Rubbing his sleep-bewildered eyelids, Paul made out a small white boat a point off the Daphne's weather bow and not more than five ship's lengths away. Yes, a man was standing up in it. He was beckoning wildly to the bark and to the sky in turn.

The boat was too far off to make out if the man were alone in it. Paul had to depend on his sight. The bark had been robbed of her glasses.

The Daphne was making about three knots an hour. While he had slept the breeze had lessened. The swell was practically gone.

"Haul her up three points," said Paul, facing the wheel. "Keep an eye on me. Every time I raise my right hand let her go off half a point. When I hold up my left: Haul up half a point—luff!"

With this instruction snapped at Emily, Paul ran forward, leaving her alone, bewildered, fearful of making a mistake. But he was satisfied she would understand. He held responsibility to be as much the mother of capacity as necessity is of invention.

By instinct alone Emily interpreted Paul's orders. She brought the Daphne to windward and until she could see the boat and its passenger's head just over the lee bow. She saw Paul spring into the fore shrouds with a coil of rope. As he did so he raised his left hand. The boat disappeared. She was sure the Daphne would run it down. Paul raised his right hand. The helmswoman let the bark go off half a point.

Paul, leaning over the rail at his last signal, tried to read a name on the stern of the little boat which came bobbing toward him. He failed.

An old man was standing up between the cockleshell's alter and second thwarts. He was babbling in delirium. His swollen tongue was protruding from his lips. He was bareheaded and his hairless crown seemed ready to burst open in fire. Now the boat was close enough to see that the derelict was alone. His clothing consisted of a shirt and trousers—dungarees. He answered Paul's hails with a leer of idiocy.

Emily steered so finely that the Daphne brought the boat alongside just abreast of the fore-rigging. As their sides touched, Paul dropped a running bowline over the old man's head and shoulders and a minute later hauled him over the side. The boat overturned as its occupant was jerked out of it and Paul regretfully saw it drift away.

The derelict crumpled in a heap at his rescuer's feet as he touched the deck. His face and neck and arms and feet were horribly sunburned. He was literally parboiled. It would have taken the woman who mothered him to recognize his pitiably swollen countenance. He was short and thick-set and between fifty-five and sixty years old. His horny nails and blunt work-worn fingers bespoke him a sailor.

Paul carried him up on the poop as the best place to work over him and laid him down in the lee of the lounge house.

Paul looked away from the stranger with a shudder. While he had been forward at the rescue and carrying the stranger aft the breeze had died away. All aloft was now idle.

"Don't think of me as being helpless, Paul. Please. I know I can do so many things. I'm not the same woman you met back there."

"Come, then." He put the wheel in beckets. "Forward——Get some water out of the galley."

Emily ran to do as she was bidden and Paul went below to the medicine chest. The medical supplies provided some strychnine tablets and, tincturing a glass of water with this heart stimulant, the castaways took turn about forcing drops of the fluid between the cracked lips. Emily discovered a jar of beef extract among the stores and made up a little of this for the sufferer.

After two hours of careful and unceasing attention the derelict opened his rheumy eyes and stared at the sky for a second.

The eyes closed again and the cracked lips muttered an inaudible blur of words. It was plainly an unconscious answer.

A little while later, as Paul was taking another observation of the sun, Emily thought she saw a gleam of consciousness in the faded gaze which found her face and held it.

"I asked him," the gold woman explained, "if he belonged to the Daphne. He——Listen——"

Paul ran the words over under his breath. They sounded familiar. They had a rhythm that touched some cell of memory. Suddenly his mind groped upon discovery. Emily uttered an exclamation in the same instant. Both of them knew what the stranger was attempting to say.

"Yes," he said with a nod. "'And Eugene Aram walked between, with gyves upon his wrists.'"

"What can the poor brain be thinking? What is hidden back of this strange thought?" Emily asked in a whisper.

"It may be as we have thought—that he belongs to the Daphne's crew. Perhaps in its disorder his brain is reflecting the crime committed aboard here in the words of Hood's poem. Yet one would imagine that if there is anything in the theory of crime suggesting crime that it would be something of the sea of which he would be thinking. Eugene Aram was a schoolmaster and he killed in the woods. This man is a sailor. There is no doubt about that."

"Don't think that, Emily. If he had a hand in what happened here——But let as not think of what's past."

Paul carried the derelict below and put him in the room next to the mate's. He swathed his burns in carron oil and tied him in the bunk so that the rolling of the vessel would not turn him out. The man had become unconscious again immediately after mumbling the bit of "Eugene Aram" which Emily had called Paul to hear. Lavelle left the derelict sleeping in apparent peace, but with a heart action that was extremely weak.

"If he lives he will be a Godsend toward helping us work ship," Paul told Emily as they went aft together to the lounge.

"Only quarter past three," she said, looking at the silver watch which he had given her to carry when he put her at the wheel.

"Will in a little while. Got to. But first I must work out this observation—see where in this world or Kingdom Come we are."

He sat down at the chart table and in a few minutes, weary though he was, finished his calculations. The result checked and confirmed his noon reckoning.

Emily stood beside him holding down the edges of the chart while he pricked off the Daphne's position and ran a line to the southeastward. It ended at Ocean Island. He ran a second to Midway; a third to Honolulu. The woman watched his long fine fingers—wondrously fine for the rough, hard things of which she knew them to be capable—handling pencil and ruler and dividers with a fascinating deftness and certainty. He seemed oblivious of everything else. An eager stimulation seemed to be driving him. The mystery of the student was about him. A feeling of woful incompetence possessed her. She realized how narrow and little her life had always been until now; how little she actually knew of all the things there were to be known. Her heart stirred of a sudden with a marvelous thrill at the thought of what a woman's triumph must be to suffer the giving of such a man as this to the world. Her breath paused tremulously. What Shanghai Elsie had said to her in the boat flashed into her mind: "You were made for the mother of men—strong men—like him."

The navigator, glancing up from his work, beheld an expression in her beautiful face which was beyond his understanding. Her glance dropped as it met his and a glow suffused her cheeks and thin, delicate ears that the dawn might have envied. A second later her eyes lifted to his again and in their expression and her smile he read elation. In his blindness he believed that she had been able to follow his work and that it was the prospect of an early deliverance which enlightened her countenance.

"There you are!" he exclaimed in a note of lively and natural pleasure. "Look! Only five hundred miles to the southeast——See that speck? That's Ocean Island. If we can't fetch that we'll try for Midway. A cable station's there. If we can't make any of these islands we'll keep right on to Honolulu. All the while we'll be lying along in the steamship track. Isn't it wonderful, eh?"

The answer came in a whisper. Tears glinted in her eyes. She was glad for his sake; glad that the stress which was upon him was so near an end. His escape, of course, meant hers and——Intuitively she sensed that he was very far away from her; that he was slipping further and further away and she started to put out a hand to touch him; to hold him. Her arm dropped as she raised it. This was not the man who had held her in his arms that morning. She heard his words dimly.

"If we can work to the south'ard and the eastward, by to-morrow noon we may begin to keep our eyes open for ships. With any kind of fair weather and a breeze from the westward land should be rising over the bows in three or four days. Think of it! Another twelve hours and you may be going over the Daphne's side into a homeward bounder!"

"Why——You mustn't be crying now. You must laugh! Sing! The chief mate of the bark Daphne would better be thinking of her shore-going togs! This is what we'll be singing in a very short time:

"I thought I heard the captain say,
Leave her, Johnny, leave her;
You may go ashore and touch your pay,
It's time for us to leave her.

"We'll sing. Oh, may we never be,
Leave her, Johnny, leave her;
On a hungry ship the like of she,
It's time for us to leave her."

With a laugh and those snatches of the old chanty of "Leave Her, Johnny" ringing from his lips in a clear, deep voice Paul led the way out on deck.

He turned from her and went forward to the standard compass. Going and returning, he looked aloft and around at the silent plain of brine. The sails still drooped in idleness. There was the barest heave in the ocean. The bark was without steerage way.

"Better lie down and take a nap," Paul said as he came back and stood at the wheel for a second. "Can't tell how long this calm will last. I'm going to try to steal a little sleep."

He did not meet her gaze, and she turned toward the sea as if she hoped its purple heart would give her throbbing one an answer. She heard Paul leave the poop and then a clang from the engine room told her he was there. It sounded like a door closing between them—a door that would never open again—and she went into the lounge to weep bitter tears which would not be stayed.

If she could have seen Paul Lavelle's face when he turned away from her and at the moment when she was giving way to her loneliness she would have understood that he was suffering, too.

After overhauling the fires under the donkey boiler, Paul threw himself at full length across the main hatch. He was mind weary; body weary; at war with himself. Staring up at the sky he brought his whole life in contemplation. Another day, as he had told the gold woman, might see them delivered from their peril in the Daphne. Anyway he felt that the world—the world in which she belonged and must have her being—was not very far off. And she would be going out of his life forever. She must. A pariah like him could not say to her, "Stay." The man who stood marked as he was could say to no woman, "Stay." All day the past had lashed him. All day the fineness of him had arraigned the weakness which had permitted him to forget that he could never claim her love. All day the memory of his madness in daring to kiss her as he had had tortured him. He groaned in his agony of spirit.

"God," he prayed aloud with lips strange to prayer, "grant that I may finish 'what remains before us of the course without dishonor to ourselves or hurt to others.' For my soul's sake I ask this."

It was dusk when Emily awoke in the lounge. By the silver watch she saw that it was a quarter past six o'clock. All was quiet as when she lay down. The bark was in the same dead calm. The creaking of the gear overhead and the slatting of the idle sails were the only sounds in the stillness. She stole below, and on her way forward paused at the door of the derelict's room. He still slept. She tiptoed inside and wet his lips with a sip of water. He murmured in unconscious thankfulness. She hurried on then toward the engine room. Paul must be there or in the galley. She came upon him lying across the main hatch. He was asleep, his head pillowed on his right arm. The light of a love that would never die came into her eyes as she stood for a second listening to his deep breathing of honest weariness.

The chill of the coming night was in the air. Emily stole aft again on tiptoe and returned with a blanket. She spread it over the sleeper with a mother's gentleness. He did not move. Sighing, she turned away and with the silence of a thief went to the galley to prepare the evening meal.

CHAPTER XXVI

Coming down from aloft, where he had gone immediately after dinner to reef and furl the topgallant sails as best he could, Emily met Paul with the news that the derelict seemed to be recovering a glimmer of consciousness.

"When I carried a cup of beef extract to him just now he was awake," she told Paul. "He seemed not at all surprised to find a woman attending him. He thinks he is in a hospital somewhere—that I am a nurse. When I asked him his name he answered: 'Number 19—cot 19, nurse.'"

"Yes; but neither the vessel's name nor Captain McGavock's nor any of those you told me were in the log book meant anything to him. His only answer to all my questions was, 'Nurse, if the captain comes in before "lights out" tell him I'd like to see him.' He's an Irishman, I should say—a kind sort of an old soul, with a rare, musical brogue."

"If he is one of the Daphne's crew, I am sure—I am certain that he had nothing to do with the mutiny."

"And that is the woman of it. Come. I'll go in to see him. Let me get a lantern out of the engine room."

"There is a lamp in his room. I filled it the way I saw you filling the sidelights."

Thus praise always came from him quickly for the doing of a helpful thing. She could imagine men working their fingers to the bone under his mastership.

Together they went aft, Emily preceding Paul through the alleyway to the derelict's door. The light in the lamp, which hung in gimbals against the forward bulkhead of the room, was low. Emily went in and turned it up.

"Yes, nurse, easier—much easier," came his answer rather thickly. His face was toward the inside of the berth. He turned over painfully, his eyelids fluttering. "Has the cap—the Ould Man——"

His lips froze as he discovered Paul Lavelle in the doorway. He started up on his right elbow. His eyes bulged wildly. His jaw went loose. He made a vain effort to lift his left hand to his brow in a salute. He tried to speak, but his tongue clicked in his throat like a twig crackling. With a weird, eery cry he fell back in the berth senseless.

"I never saw him to my knowledge until we pulled him aboard this afternoon," said Paul, recovering from his surprise. "He has mistaken me for somebody else. Poor devil is out of his head."

"I'm quite sure. But it's uncanny. Please bring the lamp over here so that I can take a good look at him."

Emily carried the light to the side of the berth and Paul bent over the stranger. He searched every feature of the weather-beaten face and his own memory at the same time. He was positive he had never seen the derelict before.

"Just out of his head, little woman—that's all. I never saw him—I don't know him, although his own mother wouldn't recognize him now."

As he spoke Paul timed the unconscious man's pulse and laid an ear to his breast. Emily caught an uncertain shake in Paul's head as he straightened.

He added this as he saw her wince and the glint of pitying tears come into her eyes.

"His heart is very weak," he went on, after a slight pause. "He seems to be in a bad mooring ground. He's burnt up as if he had been through a fiery furnace. It may sound strange to hear one speak of the sea as a fiery furnace, but it is. It can burn a man's soul out of him just as it can freeze it out. And—mock him with bitter waters he cannot drink."

There was a world of bitterness in his tone as he finished speaking and left the room to go aft to the medicine chest. He returned with some spirits of nitre to find Emily placing a wet pack across the derelict's forehead. He mixed a dose of the tincture in a tumbler of water and dropped some of the fluid between the cracked lips.

"This will help to pull the fever down," he explained. "It's all I could find back there—this nitre. He will need watching and attention to-night. If this calm holds I will slip in here now and again."

"Paul Lavelle, it is my work," the gold woman said firmly. "I've been a loafer—an idling nothing—a leaner all my life. I've never helped until now. You've taught me how. You can't unteach me. If my hands can aid this poor old man to keep a hold upon life they are going to do it. If they can make his going out any easier they are going to do it. My God, the thought—that it might be you—and a woman would turn away from—from you——"

Her voice broke. Tears choked her. She put an arm against the bulkhead and buried her face in it, away from Paul's sight. Her nobility of soul chastened his spirit. It exalted him. In silence he went out into the night. Strangely there lingered in his brain as he went about the ship two sentences Emily had uttered with unwonted fire: "You've taught me how. You can't unteach me."

There was much for the Daphne's new skipper to do. While the calm gave no sign of breaking and the lounge barometer held steady for fair weather, still the longer he contemplated the task of handling the Daphne the bigger it grew in his sight. He could not afford to let any precaution which suggested itself pass unembraced. So he turned to work on the theory that it is easier to let out a reef in a breeze than it is to furl a sail in a gale. He cut his coat according to the cloth he had. He double-reefed the foresail and the topsails and, with the donkey engine's aid, found it not such a hard task as he had imagined it might be. Steam hauled the blocks of the reef tackles closer together than sailor hands could ever have brought them. The best he could do with the mainsail was stopper it with gaskets. It would have been vain and futile to have tried to roll the heavy canvas up on its yard. He knew if it should come on to blow that the wind would take care of it as he left it, but he could not help it.

The last thing he did forward was to put the hatch covers on and bar them down. The tarpaulin had been burned or thrown overboard by the mutineers, but Paul felt certain that little water could enter the Daphne there.

As he went aft he was surprised to see a light in Elston's room. Peering through the port under the gangway ladder leading to the poop he saw Emily writing at the dead boy's desk. She stirred slightly as his eyes rested on her and as if conscious of another presence. A sense of guilt startled Paul and he hastened aft to reef down the spanker.

With the finishing of that task the skipper leaned wearily against the wheel and surveyed the things he had done alow and aloft. The moon, which, twenty-four hours gone, he had never expected to see rise again, presently caught him in its spell. It was now nearly two hours high over the bark's starboard quarter. In its beams the Daphne seemed but the delicate tracery of a ship o' dreams. It powdered the vessel with a silvery dust; enveloped her in a mystic, spiritual splendor. The gilded trucks gleamed like true gold. Masts and spars, shrouds and stays and running gear were invested with a fairy grace. The coarse, heavy sails had become gossamer in their fineness—butterfly wings at rest. The night, as if for the very beauty of the scene, wept upon the fabric in dewy tears of pearl and opal and sparkling diamond.

Emerging from the lounge Emily was caught in the moonlight's enhancement. For a second it swept from her mind what had brought her seeking Lavelle. Paul, staring aloft, did not see her nor did he hear her footfall. A hiss of steam from the donkey boiler's safety escape, which had been set at a very low pressure, broke the spell.

"It seems helpless—weak to say that words fail one in expressing a thought—an impression," said the gold woman. "But all I can say—I must say the trite thing: How wondrously beautiful!"

Her words but expressed the thought that had leaped into Paul's mind at discovering her and which he had bravely denied utterance.

"The sea has no fairer sight to give men than this—unless it is a square-rigged vessel like the Daphne, 'a towering cloud of canvas,' driving along over the deep in such a light. But how is the stranger?"

"He was quiet for perhaps an half-hour after you left. I went into the room next door—the mate's—to—to write something. Suddenly I heard him call your name, 'Lavelle.'"

"No; I heard the name, 'Lavelle'; just as distinctly as that. I was shocked. I stole in very softly and stood beside him. His eyes were closed, but he kept mumbling, 'That night at Apia——'"

"That was as far as he seemed able to get. I thought he was trying to go over some oft-told story. At last he sank back in exhaustion. I did not dare to speak to him. He has slept ever since and his fever is down. What is Apia? Where is it? What do you think he meant?"

"Apia—in the Samoan Islands. My father was lost there twenty-five years ago in a hurricane which trapped three naval squadrons. He was about my age at the time. Only a little while ago mother wrote me that a photograph I sent her might have been father's. This old fellow must have served under him. He mistook me for him when he saw me so unexpectedly in the doorway. This explains it. The way he attempted to salute when he saw me made me think he was a man-o'-war's man."

"The sea plays strange pranks, doesn't it, my friend?" Paul asked after a pause. The question drew Emily's gaze back from the satiny blue deep. His manner of address chilled her. "'My friend! My friend'?" her brain echoed. He averted his gaze sadly.

In the words a meaning was veiled that did not reach him. She was thinking of the barrier that had been building itself between them all day. No sooner did one wall go down than another rose in its place. Strangely, as she watched him staring over the deep to the southward, a feeling of contrition filled her. With the truest sympathy she said:

"I am sorry. Perhaps I shouldn't have told you what this man said. It has stirred unpleasant memories—sad ones."

"No. The finest memory I have is my father—the finest memory any son ever had."

As he spoke he seemed to go still further away from her. In silence she watched him enter the lounge and return to the deck with his sextant. He took an observation of Polaris and then went in to the chart table to work it out. With a feeling akin to shame Emily sensed that he did not wish her near him and she started below.

He said this coldly and without looking up from the book from which he was taking a set of logarithms.

"A breeze may come at any time and we'll need every bit of strength we can muster to work the ship."

"Paul, tell me frankly—have I done or said anything to hurt you? What is it? What I said down there in the stranger's room—is it that?"

The words were no sooner away from her lips than anger at herself swept her. Where was her pride?

"No, no. Of course you have not said anything. Of course not. All's well, little woman." His answer came quickly, but not without an embarrassment that she failed to understand. He bent his head over his work again. "Don't forget you are to call me at the first sign of a breeze; anyway not later than 11:30."

They had planned at dinner that she was to keep the watch for the first part of the night.

"No; I shan't forget," she answered bravely and groped down the companionway from his sight. Nor could she dream what pain it cost the lonely man at the chart table to let her go from him.

CHAPTER XXVII

"Up with ye, yez foretop bullies! Up an' give her a cheer! Hip!—--Hear her! A bloody Englishman playin' av 'Th' Star Spangled Banner!' That's for us, ye bullies! Hip, hip!—--Damn ye, cheer! Now! Hip!—Again!—She's struck! No! She's by the reef!—By God she's clear! She's in the open sea! Clear! Hip!"

This monologue, shouted as if through the teeth of a gale, suddenly broke upon the gold woman's troubled consciousness where she stood writing at William Elston's desk. It was the derelict raving. The dramatic spirit of his speech thrilled her. It conveyed to her mind a picture of a ship fighting to sea against all odds and she could see the stranger in the next room somewhere in the foreground of a ragged shore urging others—men under him—to cheer her on.

A silence followed the outburst and Emily tiptoed into the alleyway. She listened for Paul, but no sound came from him aft. She had been below about an half-hour. He must be asleep.

The gold woman entered the derelict's door softly and discovered him sitting upright in his berth, peering from under his two hands as if at something a long distance away. There was an heroic suggestion in the posture of him and in the set of his scraggly white-bearded jaw.

"She's clear—clear," came from him in a tired whisper as Emily crossed the threshold. He dropped his hands. "Hello, nurse," he said, discovering the girl. She turned up the light.

"Thankee, nurse, thankee. Another long drink, please. That's—Ah! That's good. My coppers is hot. Thankee. I'll be comin' out o' drydock soon. All I needs is t' get my head gear overhauled an' these ribs spliced. Nurse, sailormen orter have good hackmatack knees for ribs." A faint smile of humor rippled across his face. "It's a mighty long way from a fore-uppertawps'l yard t' th' foc'sle head—a mighty long way."

The listener gathered that the old man believed he was suffering from the effects of a fall. He lay back obediently at her suggestion. His eyes appeared quite rational. Although his hands were still scorching to the touch there had been an abatement of the fever. Yet his pulse was extremely weak. When Emily felt it she was surprised at the strength of his voice.

"Nurse," he said, after a short pause, "when that 'ere sky pilot comes roun' in th' mornin' I wants you t' stand by." A twinkle danced in his sea-bleached blue eyes. "He says th' sea gives up its dead. I'll be after askin' th' gentleman how he knows. Ye'll hear him shputter at that. It'll be a fair joke. A fair——"

He stopped seriously. His gaze sought the doorway. In a whisper fraught with a note of bitter fatalism he said:

"Th' sea gives nothin' back, nurse. When it takes annythin' it kapes it. Th' sky pilots are but pretindin'."

Emily sensed that the sailor's mind was groping around the appearance of Paul earlier in the evening. She feared that it would do him harm to let his mind rest on this and that it would be better if she could induce him to sleep.

"No, no, nurse. Plaze lave th' light. I'll be afther stayin' awake for th' Ould Man—that's me own skipper."

"Mother av God!" he cried. He seized her hand and held it in great stress. "Thin yez saw him, too! Yez saw Lavelle." His eyes, filled with awe, leaped from Emily's face to the open doorway and back again. "'Tis me warnin', colleen, t' be snuggin down—t' make everythin' tight!"

The thing she had wished not to do she had done unwittingly. She had turned his poor brain back to its memory of Paul's father.

The derelict shook his head in doubt, and as he did so he looked round the stateroom. His eyes picked up each article in it in a bewildered, half-familiar way.

"Yes, his son. You must have no fears. Can't you think where you are? Do try. You're aboard the bark Daphne—the Daphne."

"Daphne? Daphne?" he repeated. "No, th' Daphne wasn't there. There was th' Trenton, th' Nipsic, th' Vandalia, a Dutchmin called th' Sadler, th' Cally-ope—not Daphne." It was plain that the past was ruling his memory. "'Twas only yestiddy th' home mails come in an' brought th' 'Prince' a loikeness av his littul bhoy—littul Paul. Says th' 'Prince' t' me, 'Dan, an' 'tis home with th' littul feller I'd loike t' be.' He says that t' me, an' him th' 'first luff' an' me a common sailorman an' capt'n av th' foretop be grace av three enlistments an' sthayin' sthraight three months on ind. Now he's lyin' out there in thim God-forsaken wathers an' all because av a bloody lot av Dutchmin an' naygurs."—"Come along t' th' mass with me an' pray for God's kindness t' th' 'Prince's' sowl. Yez'll niver sail agin, my bullies, under an officher man loike 'The Prince.'"

The sweet tender praise of the father of the man she loved with all the soul of her wrung tears from the listener. She could see "The Prince" showing this sailor the picture of Paul. She could hear him speaking.

"And he called you Dan—'The Prince'?" Emily managed to say and with the hope that possibly it might suggest the derelict's identity.

"Dan? T' be sure he called me Dan. 'Rid-headed bunch av sin' he called me whin I wint on th' bind. I had a thatch in thim days as rid as th' British merchant flag." A gnarled hand wandered to his bald crown and as it touched it the sailor started up. Reason seemed to have made a breach in his poor brain. He looked round the room quickly. A light of recognition dawned in his gaze. "Dan—Dan," he kept repeating. "Daniel—Daniel Mc—Mc—Mc—Daniel McGovern!"

Emily hearkened in breathlessness. She felt herself in the presence of a mystery. Paul had read her the names of the Daphne's crew from the log. "Daniel McGovern" was not one of them.

Tears coursed down the old man's cheeks. His hands trembled. His voice quavered in a childish treble. He kept on repeating the name over and over again as if he had found it after many years and was making sure that it would not escape him again.

"Mother av God where am I?" he asked in a few seconds. In the next breath he exclaimed: "'Tis a ship I'm on! I c'n fale th' sea!"

"You're in the bark Daphne—the Daphne. Don't you understand? Can't you remember anything?"

"That's her door; that's her door," he whispered. He pointed at the stateroom door. "Takewood an' mahogany an' maple. So were th' cabins thrimmed."

Emily's heart leapt at this. He was from the Daphne. She gave him a drink of water. She started to call Paul. But when she thought of what had happened before she drew back.

"Yez are not a spirut—th' spirut av McGavock's woife, eh?" the derelict asked doubtfully.

"Murder an' hell. That's what happened here. Where's Morgan—an' th' Jap? Th' sicond mote an' th' cook?"

A cunning expression came into the derelict's face at Paul's name. His mind was breaking again.

"What d'yez know of Lavelle?" Without pausing for an answer, he went on: "'The Prince' is drown-ded these twinty odd year. An' his poor bhoy—he's gone this past twilve-month. A man—a prince av min loike his father, he was. I was along av th' bhoy in th' Yakutat."

"Aye, th' Yakutat—th' big Alaskan brute. She did for th' bhoy, but 'Th' Prince' would have loiked t' have been with us that night." A boastfulness of pride came into his voice. His eyes closed for a second as if he saw a vision. "'Twas loike mush whin she piled up. Misther Lavelle kept a-tellin' Graham he was sthandin' in too close, but 'twas no use. I heard him meself toll him twict. I was at th' wheel th' lasht toime. I can see th' two av thim just outside th' wheel-house now. 'You're wrong,' says 'Th' Prince's' son. 'I'm masther here,' says Graham. Dhrunk he was wid th' lust av pride an' power loike whin fools command. An' maybe he was dhrunk, too, wid somethin' else. 'Take yure orders or go t' yure room.' An' 'Th' Prince's' son says he: 'I'll take me orders.' I was at th' wheel agin in th' mid-watch. God help me 'twas meself that stheered her up on th' rocks, obeying orders. She climbed thim loike a woild horse. Th' scut av a third officher had th' bridge. 'Full spade asthern' he give her as' I knew thin she was broke in two. 'Full spade ahead,' an' she'd a-hung on th' rocks till mornin' whin th' shore folk could have saw us."

"A sup av water. That's it. Thankee, nurse. Where was I? Oh——Misther Lavelle comes a-tumblin' up an' Graham an' th' foorth officher. 'All hands t' th' boats,' says Graham. A mad, crazy coward he was. Says I t' meself, 'I want none av ye,' an' I followed 'The Prince's' son. 'T' th' boats.' Huh! An' not enough boats for th' half av thim aboord. I lep' from th' wheel an' shtuck t' Misther Lavelle. We had a din av woild animals t' foight. But we got our boat away—th' childer an' th' women an' th' ould folk. Lavelle he was for goin' back aboord. 'Twas suicide. I shoved off. We cleared th' side an' just thin a big naygur I had lopped av' th' ear an' overboord from th' deck reaches up an' catches our gunnle. 'Th' Prince's' son cracks at him with an oar. A fule shtood up i' th' boat, sayin', 'Take him aboord.' An' we full thin as a tick. Th' next minynte an' over we wint.

"Loike an hour ago I see it. Says a littul lady forninst me—we'd taken her husband aboord 'cause we'd seen him sick about th' deck—says she, 'If we must die, we'll die thegither, Jawn.' An' all round was Bedlam."

With a shudder he lay back. Emily Granville knew that it was of her mother and father that the derelict had just spoken. But even in the stress of feeling which possessed her there formed in her mind an high, practical purpose. She knew that if this man could but reach the ears of the world with this tale it meant the vindication of Paul Lavelle. It meant all that was dear to him—his good name, his honor restored. The sailor must not die. He must live. She would fight death for him and in justice she must conquer. If she could do this thing for her love she would have nothing else to ask of life.

But of a sudden dread seized her. Perhaps it was only the tale of a disordered brain that she had heard. Why had not this man come forward at the inquiry which had sent Paul forth branded a coward? Why had he not told this story then? If he had been on the Yakutat that night, how was it that Paul did not remember him? Could it be that this man's weakened mind had found suggestion for the tale from the force of her own mental desire?

"But what became of you after that night—after the Yakutat was lost?" she asked.

The last anchorage of her hope went with that. It was but a maundering tale, after all. Or else her senses were tricking her and she had imagined that he had said these things about Paul and her mother and father and the Yakutat!

"It all came back to me," the derelict went on wearily—"twelve years of my loife. I was in th' seamen's Bethel in Hong Kong—just a year gone. An' out av a 'Frisco paper I spelled that th' Lavelle av th' Yakutat—'Th' Prince's' bhoy—was gone—lost in a tramp off Rangoon. Like th' loightnin' sthrikes th' twilve lost year come back. Says I, 'I'm Daniel McGovern.' Whin I was afther tellin' th' sky pilot he wint an' tol' th' docthors all about it. Th' newspapers printed it. Whin th' Yakutat's boat wint over somethin' struck me head. A whale ship picked me up. 'Th' Prince's' boy niver knew I'd served with his father. All th' thrubble in me head shtarted before I j'ined th' Yakutat. I was afther fallin' from th' tawps'l yard av some ship. Her name—I can't raymimber where 'twas or what ship 'twas. I tould Elston about it—fine lad he was—an he laughed at me till I give him th' piece out av th' Hong Kong newspaper. He laughed——I'll be afther shlapin', shlapin', nurse. I'll be——"

Daniel McGovern's eyes closed. He seemed very weak. For a second Emily feared that he was dying. Then, her abiding faith in the justice of things renewed her.

She ran from the derelict's room into the mate's. Earlier in the evening she had found on Elston's desk a book—a half-filled diary—from which she had torn a page upon which to write. She carried this book and pen and inkwell back to McGovern's room. She would reduce McGovern's story to writing and make him swear to it. As she spread the book open upon a chair and knelt beside it to write a newspaper clipping fluttered out from its pages. A glance confirmed the truth of all the derelict had said about his strange lapse of memory:

The cabin clock struck seven bells—11:30—but she did not hear it. Oblivious to all else save her task and the flickering life in the berth at her side she began to write a statement of all McGovern had said. She felt that it was in her to stay death until the derelict had signed it.

CHAPTER XXVIII

A crash which shook him bodily brought Paul Lavelle upstanding from the berth in the lounge. The daze of a heavy sleep clung to him. For an instant he could not imagine where he was. He was in utter darkness.

There was another crash where the spanker boom slammed back from starboard to port again. Then, the Daphne lay over under the impact of a vicious gust of wind.

It was the boom which had awakened the sleeper. He leaped out on deck to find himself in a shapeless blackness. There was barely a breeze, but the air was filled with eery noises. Overhead, overside, wherever he turned, he heard them—snarls, whines, whimperings, and the creaking as of huge pinions wheeling. A wolf pack might have been disputing a kill with a horde of vultures.

The contrast of this with the exquisite moonlight night upon which Lavelle had closed his eyes was appalling. He groped his way to the wheel, which was in beckets to keep it from rolling, and peered into the compass. An unconscious sigh of thankfulness for the forethought which had made him light the binnacle lamp escaped from him. The Daphne was heading north by east. The gust of wind which had slammed the spanker boom must have come out of the southeast. He faced that point. Another gust confirmed the assumption. He ran into the lounge and struck a match. The silver watch lay on the chart table. It said 1 o'clock. He had not returned for this, but to see the barometer. It stood at 30:00; just where it had hung all day.

But what he had not discovered by daylight he now saw in the flickering match light. The barometer hand and the indicator were caught together. His heart went cold, he lit another match and struck the bulkhead with his clenched fist. The blow jarred the hand and indicator apart. The delicate wisp of blue steel quivered at 30:00 for a breath. Then, it began to fall. It reached 29:10 and clung. Even as the match went out it recorded 29:00 and was still falling.

He had seen a mercurial barometer go from 29:30 to 26:03 in the Kau Lung. That was a world's record!

Despair seized him. What could he and a lone woman do in a brute of a vessel like this—undermanned even with twenty men before the mast?

"I'll beat you—you and all your foulness! You sneak!" he yelled at the blackness.

There was no answer. She was asleep, poor girl, he thought. That was why she had let him oversleep; why she had not called him when it turned black.

Echoes answered him. Running forward, he saw the light beaming from the derelict's room. As he reached the doorway he beheld the girl standing beside the old man's berth, a book in her left hand and her right uplifted.

The book dropped from Emily's hand. She swayed where she stood. She had fought and won a battle as brave as any field of war ever knew. Yet an angry glance, which struck her and cut like a whiplash, was her reward.

"Why didn't you answer me when I called?" Lavelle demanded, but paused not on an answer. "Get aft to that wheel! Go! Run! Keep her nor'east until I can get back to you!"

With that he was gone from her. Like a soldier, without questioning, without a word, she went aft to do what this man had bidden.

The fire under the donkey was dead when Lavelle got to the engine room. It would take an hour to make steam. The barometer and his sea wisdom told him that he had only minutes to prepare.

Whatever the battle was to be it was with his own hands that Paul Lavelle must fight it. With this realization a terrific rage filled him. It was fed with each breath that he snatched out of the blackness. The sea was a personal enemy. Thus men who deal with it in long intimacy come to visualize it. The sea was a sneak—a coward; always striking below the belt.

Lavelle had squared the yards before he had gone aft in the evening, leaving the braces slack so as to cast the Daphne on the most advantageous tack at the first coming of a breeze. He had expected a wind from the north and west. Here it was out of the southeast. The gusts which had roused him had struck the bark on the starboard quarter. It had brought her to on that side. She was now forging ahead on the starboard tack. As she rode she was under a double-reefed foresail, reefed upper and lower fore and main topsails, foretopmast-staysail, and inner or boom jib. The growing breeze lifted the slack out of the starboard or weather braces. The lone worker in the darkness led the falls of the lee braces to the main deck capstan and hove them in. And wherever he went he belayed rope and line with a double hitch. There was a finality about everything he did.

He set the maintopmast-staysail, hoisting it with the capstan. He would ride her with that if it should be possible to heave her to after he had located the bearing of the storm's center.

He ran aft only to stop at the entrance to the alleyway. He remembered the boom jib.

He sped forward again, found the jib halyards, and let them go. As a last touch of precaution he bent the jib downhaul to the foretopmast-staysail clew as a preventer sheet.

Aft he sped again and through the cabin. A faint murmur came to him as he ran by the derelict's room.

Out of the pile of slop-chest staff in the after cabin he snatched an oilskin coat and sou'wester. He struggled into them as he climbed through the companion way into this lounge.

An impulse to smash it for its trickery seized him. He forbore and plunged outside. He thrust Emily away from the wheel. As he bent to peer into the binnacle she shuddered at the rage which distorted his face. Thus men, she thought, must look in battle with the blood lust upon them. There was something primordial, relentless, about him. He was the elemental man, sensate that a kill was at hand.

The Daphne was heeling over, further and further, under the onslaught of the rising wind.

The roughness with which Lavelle had pushed Emily away from the wheel started a demon of resentment to life in her. Her arms were aching. It had seemed that the wheel must draw them from their sockets while she was alone. Steering the Daphne while Lavelle had been forward had not been the tame task of the afternoon.

"Get below! Close every port—every door! Jump! Then, come back and light that lamp in the lounge!"

Anger swept her at his brutal tone. Tears blinded her. They were the tears of a rage of which she had never believed herself capable, oho could not move.

A sea slopped over the weather quarter and ran hissing across the deck to leeward. It sucked hungrily at the gold woman's feet and ankles. At its touch her rage grew, but passed from the man at the wheel to the sea. It was the sea that he hated, not her. It was the sea that she hated. It was the sea that had spoken through him. The sea was his enemy. It became in that moment personal to her—her enemy.

Thus the spirit of Lavelle reacted upon Emily Granville's. Could she have seen her face at that instant she would have discovered in it the same elemental, the same primitive passion, which had shocked her in his.

Lavelle saw her when she returned and lit the lamp in the lounge. She wore a long oilskin. A sou'wester covered her head. Out of the tail of his eye he caught her staring at the barometer. He noted it with a thought that she had "some sense."

She came out to him and had to press her lips against his ear to make him hear her message.

The Daphne was in a trap. Somewhere near her—somewhere in the southern quadrants of the compass between the east and the west—the center of a storm was bearing down upon her. Whether the barometer was lying or telling the truth was of little moment now. Lavelle knew he could not be mistaken in the signs of a revolving storm. He knew the meaning of the wolf-like noises and the wing creakings in the air; the oily, sooty, sight-killing blackness. But one sign was absent and, even as he noted this, it appeared—a sickening, brick-red coloring which cuts the eyes acridly like hay smoke. It diffused itself through the blackness without lessening the night's impenetrability. With its coming the wind veered quickly from the S.S.E. into the south. By the law of storms this change told the lone man arrayed against the sea that the center was bearing upon the Daphne eight points to the right, or out of the S.S.W. The bark was trapped in the storm's advancing or dangerous semicircle. He could not heave her to now. There was but one thing to do: Run. Let the storm overtake the bark and catch her in its vortex and—the sea must win. It depended alone on the Daphne's worthiness and the hands and brain of the man at her helm to beat it.

With a full-manned ship the thing to do now was heave to. The enraged man laughed to himself at the thought of his trying to do this alone.

By half-past two the wind had veered into the S.S.W. and was blowing a whole gale. Taking it broad over the starboard quarter the Daphne was fleeing northeast. At times her helmsman was sure she was lifting free of the mauling waters and hurtling through space. Again he felt that she was bound headlong toward the quiet ooze; that no vessel could withstand the onslaughts of wind and brine which were being rained upon her. But never his rage at the sea grew less. It burned in him like a living fire; it robbed him of all sense of fatigue.

Emily, sitting in the lounge and watching the barometer for any change, saw the silver watch mark the hour when the day should have been breaking. But no light rifted the blackness outside. The barometer hand clung quivering at 28:00! The Daphne's master—yes, her master, too—had told her she must rest as much as she could. Not for her own sake, but the battle's; that was his reason. "Because I may want to use you!" was what he had yelled when she had put her ear up to his lips.

When the watch said six o'clock and there came no day, Emily suddenly realized what a time had passed since Paul had taken the wheel from her hands—four hours and a half. Not a bite had crossed lips in eleven hours. It was impossible to get forward to the galley. As she admitted this she remembered the canned provisions in the alleyway stateroom opposite the derelict's. She recalled also the flour and biscuit barrels in the starboard alleyway stateroom.

The gold woman went caroming down the companionway and through the reeling saloons. The din of an hundred forges filled them. The derelict's light was giving a last flicker. Daniel McGovern slept. As the lamp went out Emily discovered her book on the floor and picked it up. She put it on a shelf in the storeroom and fled with three cans which she felt out of the darkness. She carried these up into the lounge. One of the cans held corn—the others tomatoes. She dropped below again and groped to the pantry. She was seeking water. There wasn't a drop in the tank. The discovery staggered her. The man at the wheel must drink. An idea of a substitute flashed into her mind. The tomatoes would serve for food and drink. She located a hook under the china racks and found a can opener she remembered having seen there.

As a glimmer of day asserted itself in the blackness, it found Emily standing at the wheel beside Paul, holding a can of tomatoes up to his lips so that he could drink when he dared. He managed to snatch two mouthfuls. Then, the can was blasted out of the girl's hands. It flattened itself against the mizzonmast. The tin cylinder might have been a bit of cardboard. It held where it struck for a second, as if the gale had imbedded it in the steel mast.

With this sudden growth in the fury of the gale came the slightest increase of daylight. This light seemed to spring from the sea; not from overhead. It was sufficient to trace what lay forward of the break of the poop. Two tall, reeling masts with whalebone tips, the edges of the rails, an outline of the top of the forward house, and the forecastle head rising out of a roil of waters composed the suggestion to Emily's mind that that part of the Daphne was still there. And all round were ragged peaks of water like the ice-crusted crests of mighty mountains. They were Alps gone drunk. The Daphne was hurtling from one peak to another—smashing through them.

The light restored Lavelle's vision to enable him to read in one glance the tally of the battle. But a ribband remained of the big mainsail which he had been unable to furl. The fore-upper topsail had left only its leech ropes behind. There was not a head sail left except the foretopmast-staysail. This, the maintopmast-staysail, the reefed foresail, the fore lower topsail, and the upper and lower main topsails and the spanker still held. The fore and aft bridges were gone. A twisted stanchion told where the standard compass had stood. The donkey funnel, the galley stovepipe, and the empty boat-chocks were missing—the top of the forward house was swept clean.

Scarcely had Lavelle's eyes made this assessment when the main upper topsail went. It split with a shot-like crackling. A second later only a wisp of canvas was left to tell that a sail had ever been bent to the yard.

Anger burned in Emily at the sight. It was personal—the ravaging of that sail. The gale flung a cry of protest back in her throat. The slope of Paul's sou'wester hid his face from her. The point of a grim jaw was all that she could see. Only his arms moved with the wheel in steadying the bark's drive. Otherwise he might have been a fixture of the ship. It was not enough to be near him. A yearning to hear his voice came upon her; to look in his eyes; to read his thoughts. She caught him, jerking his head to bring her nearer. She struggled up in the lee of him and pressed her ear to his lips.

That was all she heard. She did not understand for the moment what he meant. Then, it dawned upon her wondering consciousness that he wanted a piece of tobacco. A piece of tobacco! Her brain pounded on this as if it would never let the thought go. She fought her way into the lounge, and as she went she remembered a box of oaky, black slabs which she had seen in the slop-chest litter. She had reached the bottom of the companion way when the Daphne gave a shuddering leap. It hurled the girl across the saloon to leeward. She caught the knob of a stateroom door and dragged herself from her knees to her feet. Looking forward, through the port alleyway, she saw a flood of water pouring in through the door opening out on the main deck.

Instinct carried Emily to this breach in the wall of the bark's defense. She got her back to the door, like a woman of the Zuyder Zee warding a broken dyke gate, and she closed it. The strength of the primitive fighting man's woman was hers in the struggle which accomplished this. She cried in anger as she bolted the teakwood slab against the ravaging waters. Yet with this thing done, her first thought was that she must get back to the wheel with a piece of tobacco. Going aft, she did not notice that the derelict's berth was empty, but the man at the wheel knew that the stranger was not there.

Hardly had Emily left the deck when the fore lower topsail went tattering out of its bolt ropes. The Daphne shook herself as if freed from a leash. The man who watched nodded in approval. Had it been possible for him to have cut this sail away when the main upper topsail had gone he would have done it. In the moment that he nodded he saw the flash of a man's face going over the rail in the welter to leeward. The face was calm. Death seemed already to have masked it. It was the derelict going away.

"Why, that—that's Driscoll—the quartermaster who was with me—stood by me—the night the Yakutat was lost!"

It was thus in the instant that the sea gulped Daniel McGovern that recognition flashed into Paul Lavelle's mind. But as the thought formed he put it away from him. His eyes were tricking him. A man can't stand for six, seven, or eight hours—he had lost count of time—staring at a compass card which whirls and dips like a crazy roulette wheel at Macao and trust his sight. After Chang had spent a twelve-hour trick at the Kau Lung's wheel he had imagined many strange things. The quartermaster, Driscoll, had been lost these ten years past—ten years this very month of March. And the sea was trying to make him believe that the derelict was he: endeavoring to trick his brain because it couldn't beat him any other way. This thought refueled his rage.

The belly of the spanker split from head to foot with the sharp staccato-rattling of a Gatling. The helmsman's senses apprehended it as it happened. Before the Daphne's head had fallen off half a point at this sudden release of pressure on her after part Lavelle had met it.

Emily, struggling to force the lounge door open against the gale, saw and heard the spanker go. It dazed her to note that Lavelle did not glance up. She had to throw herself flat on the deck to get to the wheel. Crawling up under Paul's lee she held the tobacco up in front of him, keenly wondering what he meant to do with it. She had been able to imagine only that he intended to use it in some mysterious way in connection with the compass; perhaps to keep the card from rolling and whirling. Paul settled the mystery quickly by wolfing a corner of the black plug. He nodded with satisfaction as his jaws closed on it. It seemed fantastic to the girl. She could have screamed in delight—she who had loathed tobacco chewers as long as she could remember. The incident was fraught with a message of hope that words could not have conveyed.

By signs Paul made Emily understand that she was to fill and trim the binnacle lamp. This task took her below to levy on the oil in the derelict's lamp and the lamp in the medicine chest. Then it was she discovered that Daniel McGovern had left the Daphne. She realized how the alleyway door had come to be open, but at the time her senses were beyond apprehending that a stranger had come out of the sea and gone back to it. She levied upon the storerooms again and crawled up into the lounge. The silver watch said noon. The barometer stood at 28:01! When she tried to open the door and get back to Paul with food and this news, she could not budge it more than an inch. The gale held it. She looked out of the after weather port. Through the flying spume she saw Paul glance up. His eyes rested on her for a second. He shook his head for her to stay where she was.

There came a lull at three o'clock. Emily's recruited strength enabled her to fight her way to the wheel with another can of tomatoes and some crackers. She replaced the lighted binnacle lamp. It went out. Four times she had to return to the lounge and relight it before she succeeded in spiting the gale. As she straightened up finally in success, she saw Paul's gaze shoot up to windward.

Not three hundred yards away and abreast of the Daphne drove a big four-masted, painted-port bark—a bulk of twenty-five hundred tons—under a reefed foresail and a reefed main lower topsail. For a breath her midship section hung poised on a peak of water, the rest of her red underbody, fore and aft, clear of the welter. Her poles pierced the lowering sky. The peak dropped from under her like the jet of a fountain ceasing. She fell away into a cañon, wave-walled higher than her tops. The wind went out of her foresail. The topsail drooped. She paused in her flight like a wounded bird, reeled helplessly; and then the wall of water over her stem fell, pooping her. A huddle of men started from around the foot of her jiggermast. One of them in bright yellow oilskins reached the doomed thing's port rail and waved to the Daphne high over him as if cheering her on. Another wall of water and still a third crashed upon her. Her bows rose. Stern first she went down to the port of missing ships, a hurricane shrieking her requiem.

In the twinkling of an eye, even as a trout snatches a fly, this proud venture of man was; and then it was no more.

Brain-stunned, incapable of comprehension, Emily crawled round the binnacle and got behind the lee side of the wheel. In a lull she heard Paul yelling.

She obeyed as one in a trance. As the lounge door banged behind her the comparative quiet within, though it was a veritable orgy of sound, enveloped her senses like a drug.

It was seven o'clock when she awoke. Through the weather port she saw the yellow-colored head at the wheel touched by a gleam of the binnacle light. Seventeen hours now he had been standing there like that. She lighted the lounge lamp. The barometer stood at 28:00.

When she fought her way out to him with this word and shrieked it at him he simply nodded that he heard.

In that instant the Daphne, paused slightly. A shiver went through her. There was a crash which sounded even above the roar of the storm. It was as if a masked battery had ambushed the bark from overhead. The foretop-gallant mast and all its hamper and everything above the crosstrees on the main were going by the board. A streak of lightning illuminated the gale's work.

Emily found the end of the gasket with which Paul was lashed to the wheel shaft. She tied it around her waist and took hold of the lee wheel. It was her answer to his savagery. He saw what she did and he did not send her away.

Thus, with never a word, they stood together for two hours during the height of the storm, hurtling along the coast of eternity.

Of a sudden there came a rift in the clouds overhead. A shaft of moonlight shot through the blackness and Paul's hand covered the gold woman's in a gentle pressure where it clutched a spoke.

Emily unlashed herself and brought him another can of tomatoes. She took her post beside him again without a word. By midnight the gale's back was broken. The sea kept dropping with the lessening of the wind. It was long after dawn, however, when Paul unlashed himself from the wheel and put Emily in his place.

"You take her now for a few minutes," he said in a broken husky voice. "Going heave her to."

He started forward. His legs went out from under him. He struggled to his feet only to drop again. He got up moaning and with a curse on his lips. Clutching the rail he reeled down to the main deck.

Emily heard the palls of the capstan and then Paul's voice came to her in a pathetic wail.

"Hard down! Hard down!" he cried, but it was a sweep of his arm which carried his meaning to her. In obeyance she rolled the wheel over. The Daphne came round on her heel, until the maintopsail, flying aback, hove her to.

"I'm pretty tired—tired," he said in a whisper. He crumpled in exhaustion where he had fought for thirty hours. Blood oozed from the ends of his swollen fingers. His eyes lay far back in his head. His breath came in moans and sobs.

CHAPTER XXIX

Pain which stabbed with daggers of fire and ground and twisted like the working of cogs stirred Paul about noon into consciousness. He lay across the wheel grating where he had dropped, nor had the gold woman's strength been equal to moving him inside. A pillow was under his head; a blanket covered him. At his feet wrapped likewise in a blanket and her head on one of the lounge cushions slept his "partner." As the hard deck was his pallet, so she had chosen to make it hers. He realized the wonderful meaning of this with a thrill which lifted the daze from his aching brain and eyes.

With the instinct which has been given to women alone to serve and watch by sense Emily awoke in the instant that Paul moved to a sitting posture. Their glances met in a smile of trustful, mutual understanding.

"Well, partner," Paul said drily and looking round the Daphne, "we are a bit battered, but I think we may say—we are still in the ring."

The humanness of the little speech lifted the cloud of the night from her spirit. She laughed. This man could fight as she had never dreamed it possible that human brain and flesh could, and when it was all over he could smile. She brushed away a mist which gathered on her lashes and struggled to her feet.

"And it is worth everything to be—be here in the ring—all the battering—all the strife—with you—a partner like you."

As Paul spoke he struggled halfway to his feet only to sink back again with his breath catching in pain. His left hand, with which he had tried to pull himself up, fell from the wheel. He compared it with his right. Both were swollen and purple. The cuffs of the oilskin coat dropped back and showed his shirt wristbands choking the flesh. But it was not his hands that hurt so much as it was his feet. They seemed ready to burst the shoes.

A sob broke from Emily at his helplessness. She dropped on her knees at his side and picked up his right hand. All the tenderness of her woman nature was alive in the instant.

Tears choked further utterance. Alarm for his safety seized her. A terrible apprehension touched her heart.

"There never was a battle fought without somebody getting hurt." He tried to smile despite his pain. "Remember I was at the wheel a pretty long time."

"That long?" He nodded. "Please get me a knife—there ought to be one in the pantry."

Emily hastened below and returned with a small sharp carver. Paul held out both hands to her.

She shrank from him with a cry. His smile at the thought which he read in her eyes made her study him with a strange, frightened glance.

She severed the wristbands and the tears which fell on the bruised hands seemed for the moment to salve their hurt. He offered to take the knife then, but she knelt quickly at his feet and slashed the wet, binding leather from them. The while she did it he kept abjuring her to be careful not to cut off a foot by mistake. He would have been silent could he have known how sacred to this woman was the doing of this personal service for him. But it was just as well that he was not silent, for as she saw what the sea had done to him it took the last element of her will to keep from breaking down.

"Now you must go and lie down," she urged when she had helped him to get up to a standing position.

He swayed and sank to his knees. His will nor her strength could keep him up. He gritted his teeth in rebellion.

This came from him in a savage cry. He tried to rise again. He got one foot under him and then fell inertly with his back against the side of the lounge house. Abused Nature would have her due.

The sight of this strong man down, helpless, tore the heart of the gold woman from its moorings. She knelt beside him, agony blinding her with tears.

"Paul, you must listen to me," she pleaded passionately. "You must let me help you inside—where you can rest—where I can do something for you—something to bring back your strength—bathe your hands and feet."

A gentle relaxation of mind and body was stealing over him under the pressure of the arm with which she supported his head.

"But you must," Emily went on. "It is my part—my duty, my privilege! I will do it! You must do as I say until you are well and strong. It will not be long."

The rebellion of his spirit grew quiet under the influence of her surpassing tenderness. He thought it pleasant to have somebody say must to him.

"Look, Paul, the ocean grows calmer with the minutes. The skies are clearing. There is nothing we could do——"

"But there's so much to do——" His senses began slipping away. He was able to murmur only, "Water," before a long blank came.

The gold woman looked round for the water canister which she had filled and brought aft when Paul had collapsed and fallen asleep. It lay overturned down to leeward. Laying his head on a pillow she ran forward and refilled the canister. At the first sup which she was able to force into his month he opened his eyes.

"More, more," he pleaded when she would have taken the canister from his lips, thinking he could drink no more. "Oh, that is so good," he sighed, finishing the draught. "I feel much better already."

Although Paul smiled bravely, his eyes betrayed him. Emily saw that he was fighting to conceal a great pain.

"Come, Paul." She lifted his head again. "You must try to get inside. You must do this for me."

He looked up into her face, and there was that in it which filled him with meekness.

"I'll do what you say," he answered in a whisper, and he summoned his last reserve of strength.

On hands and knees he crawled into the lounge, Emily taking as much weight from his swollen wrists as she could. She cut the oilskin coat from his shoulders so that he should not suffer the pain of having the sleeves drawn over his hands. She spread a berth deftly, hurried below, and returned with dry comfortable clothing which she found in the lockers under the skipper's bed. The slop-chest supplies were soaking in the water which had come in before she had succeeded in shutting the alleyway door. She went below again and brought lint and bandages from the medicine chest. All of these things she did without suggestion. It was part of the new efficiency unto which she had won. Had she been trained to do what she did she could not have done it more thoroughly. This man whom she served might have been her own child.

Watching her quick movements from where he sat on the floor of the lounge, Paul wondered whence she was drawing the strength that was denied him. Nor was it given to either of them to understand this strength which love can bring to its service. It is something not to be understood.

"Because you have rendered your service," she interrupted. "You made me rest. You stood alone through all the fight. At times I rebelled at it, but now I am glad. I slept this morning and——" She paused with a shudder. "I know I must have slept—or gone out of my senses—during the storm. There are blanks—so many——We are all alone again, you know. The derelict——"

She bent over him to help him to the waiting berth. A plait of her hair swept his lips. He kissed it as she drew it back and tossed it over her shoulder. Her bosom touched his head. She did not know that she was but adding torture to his pain.

"No, partner," he protested quickly. "I have let you do too much already. Let me try alone."

"There," he said with a small note of triumph, and he was fearful of meeting her gaze, for he sensed that she stood waiting. "I think—if——See how she's heading, please."

He looked out through the door at the wheel jerking in its beckets like a horse champing a bit.

"Then this breeze ought to be about nor'nor'west." He paused, and then added quickly as he saw her, in all her innocence, coming back:

"If I could get something warm to drink—some coffee—or tea. Do you think——"

He lifted his arms over his head. By a levy on all his will he concealed the pain which tore him at the effort. It satisfied her.

"You shall have something warm to drink as soon as these hands can make it," she said, and as he heard her going forward he threw himself on the berth and buried his face in the pillow to smother the cry of anguish which his lips refused to stay.

Swiftly as Emily moved to her task, it took her longer than she had imagined it would to prepare something. The galley was in a litter of wreckage and the range was water-soaked where the sea had poured through the unprotected vent left by the swept-away stovepipe. When she returned aft again it was to awaken Paul from a doze. In the meantime he had succeeded in changing into the dry clothing she had laid out for him. He had also bandaged his ankles and wrists.

"It was the best I could do quickly," she explained, raising the chart table and placing the things on it. The table had fallen some time during the night and the silver watch lay dashed in pieces on the door, its parts mingling with the internals of the barometer which had been torn from its fastenings. The sextant, undamaged, lay where it had been hurled on the starboard bench or berth opposite Paul.

"It's all right, partner," Paul said as Emily discovered the broken things. "Don't worry."

When it came to drinking his tea his hands could not hold the mug in which she was compelled to serve it. She gave it to him mouthful by mouthful. The hot drink was stimulating. There was satisfaction of hunger, too, in the biscuits and marmalade. She stopped feeding him and drank and ate something only when he closed his lips firmly and turned his face from her.

And all the while there was raging within him a battle against the impulse of his consuming love to take this wonderful innocent woman to his breast. Had he not won the right to tell her that he loved her? a voice within kept repeating, and always the specter of the past, armed with the resolution of silence he had formed two days before, cried: "No; unless you are a coward."

"I think I will sleep," Paul said presently, when Emily offered to rub and rebandage his ankles.

"You thought nothing of doing it for me. You have done everything for me and with a tenderness that I can remember only as part of my mother. You are so tender and again you are so harsh—as hard and cold as steel."

"The sea makes one harsh——" He could not control his voice and he stopped short in fear of whither he might be led. He noticed then for the first time that Emily's skirt was clinging to her damply. "Do please go below and get into some fresh, dry clothing. The thought that you are looking out for yourself will help me to sleep. Do try to lie down, too."

"If there is nothing more I can do here I will go," she said obediently. "But it is a strange thing: With all the wetting I have undergone I have not the sign of a cold."

"Salt water ought to have at least one virtue," he answered. As he spoke he nodded for her to go below.

Paul Lavelle slept only for a few minutes at a time, if he really slept at all during the next couple of hours. He heard the gold woman descend the companionway and he followed her footsteps through the cabin. Even when all was quiet below and he knew that Emily must be lying down wakefulness rode his brain. He could see the future stretching away in loneliness without this woman in his life, and for the first time in all the suffering he had known he thought of a way out. In his blackest hours of the past ten years this had never occurred to him. To fight on to the end without cease, with never a let-up in the drive, had been the ruling impulse of his spirit. To fight on now in silence and give life to this precious woman; to stand up manfully no matter what the odds, with his whole soul in the battle, until he should bring her to safety—this was the one course. After that there would be a way if it were denied him that he should not suffer death in the giving of life to her. A gnawing pain in his left hand finally drew his attention to it. He saw that the green jade ring which he had worn constantly since leaving Yokohama was choking the finger which it encircled. He sat up to take it off, and as he did so he was startled to hear a strange heavy footfall in the cabin. He was on the point of trying to rise when Emily came up through the companionway. It was her footfall that had alarmed him. As her head and shoulders rose above the teakwood rail around the staircase, the sun, now far down in the west, shot a golden beam through the port over Paul's berth. It touched her head with the fire of a divine beauty.

"Oh, I woke you," she whispered tremulously, and at the same time she sensed his depression of spirit.

"No, I was awake," was all he could say for the moment. It came from his lips in a barely audible voice.

To be loved by and by love to possess a woman like this—the world, aye a thousand worlds—were well lost! That was the thought which excluded everything else from his mind.

The glow of a sleep which had refreshed and restored lingered in the cheeks of the gold woman and in the tips of her shelly ears. Her mouth was retouched with its natural delicate scarlet. Her sensitive nostrils quivered at the sunlight's touch. Her blue-shirted bosom, heaving ever so slightly from the exertion of climbing the companionway, moved the loose plaits of her hair hanging over her shoulders like ropes of molten gold. Hardship had drawn her features only slightly. Youth's capacity of quick recovery was hers. Physically she was little changed, but there was a subtle difference in her. Her whole being now seemed to breathe: "I have no doubt of life."

"I've changed and slept," she said as Paul's glance swept her. "I feel as if there had never been a storm."

"Are you laughing at them?" she asked. She drew back her skirt slightly and exhibited a pair of rubber sea boots which were inches too large for her. There was something boyish in the action that did draw a smile from Lavelle. "You are laughing," she went on, and pouted prettily. "But do so as much as you wish. They're sensible."

"Right you are. They're the very thing for decks like this. We should have thought of them before."

"They're much too large, but I've put on socks and socks and stuffed the toes with things."

This statement of a most obvious fact brought a genuine laugh from Paul. It passed quickly as the pain caused by the ring reasserted itself.

"Oh, let me do that for you," Emily said, crossing to his side. Before he could object she had knelt by him and taken his hand. "Why did I not think of this hours ago? Poor, poor fingers. Am I hurting you? There?"

The perfume of her hair, of her breath, of her whole being was about him. As the ring came off his hand closed on hers and he slipped the jade, with its strange seal in Chinese hieroglyphics, over her third finger. It was her left hand that he had chosen.

"I want you to take this, Emily—to wear it." He was fighting hard to control his voice. "Chang gave it to me the day I left Yokohama—when the old chap thought he would never see me again: the day you and I met."

"You must keep it. Have I never told you what it says—that seal?" She shook her head. "In Canton there is a very old temple. It is doubtful who built it. It stands near—not far from the Hall of the Five Hundred Wise Men. This seal is copied from its altars: 'Man has many reckonings with man, but only one with God.'"

The gold woman looked up, starting to repeat the line as Paul finished it. What was on her lips died there, unutterable in the light of his gaze, and what it awakened in her. Her eyes flashed back to his an answer of fire. The barriers of his determination crashed.

The gold woman's mouth met his and clung, rendering with flame its first kiss of love.

"Oh, I love you, woman of all the world, love you, love you! I am living alone by the power of this love. It has been mine for ages. It has been—it is my strength! It is my soul! It is the breath of my soul! Its single impulse, its desire, its law, its life!"

In silence they held each other's gaze in adoration until suddenly a shadow of dread darkened the man's face.

"Another storm such as we have just passed through——We could not live through it, darling. There was hardly a minute of last night or the day before which did not come armed with a summons to judgment. And, oh, the bitterness that was mine when I thought that you could not know; that I could not tell you what was in the soul of me!"

"But, Paul, even had death come to us then, I should have known it—afterward. I should have known it and you would have known that I loved you."

"Darling," he murmured, and yet, as he kissed her eyes, the specter of the past laid its cold finger upon his lips. He drew back. "Some day you may hate me."

"If we live the days will come when—I come to you a broken, spurned thing. I have no place among the men of my people. I am wild! Crazy! My tongue should be torn from me for telling you what I have. I have no right to tell—I have no right to love! And you of all women——Emily, there is something—that night on the Yakutat, I must tell you—we cannot——"

"No, no, no, Paul. You mustn't. I know. There is nothing to tell me. There is no past to come between us. From the moment that I knew on the Cambodia that you were Paul Lavelle I knew the truth. There is no past. But there is a future, my darling—our future." She drew his head to her and kissed his eyes. "My fearless stars. For my faith's reward I ask only this: Your silence until I say you may speak. Promise."

"I promise," he answered, with a strange, indefinable hope burgeoning in his heart.

As he spoke the sun passed from the ports of the lounge and brought Paul Lavelle from his dreaming to the reality of a peril which he had too long forgotten. Emily read his thought.

"I will go forward and prepare our evening meal," she said. She kissed him and went out of the lounge, and at her going torment ruled his heart.

"My God, what have I been doing! What have I been thinking? Where is my manhood that I should be lying here sacrificing her? What a weak, shameless love mine must be!"

A feeling of abasement scourged him as each thought clamored for an answer. Although his body rebelled, he arose and kept his feet. Groping below, he found a pair of boots which would admit his ankles and went forward.

Emily, with a cry of amazement, discovered him suddenly, standing in the engine room door.

"Paul, you must go back. You must rest," she commanded. "It's clear. Go back. How can you stand?"

"There's too much Irish in me, dear," he answered, forcing a smile. "You must never let an Irishman stop to nurse his hurts. He can't keep his mind on pain and the fight at the same time."

He was determined and she wisely forbore to say anything else about his physical condition. The meal that she prepared—the hot coffee, the warmth of the galley fire—brought life in them to a glow. Tomatoes formed one of the dishes she cooked. Paul shuddered at the sight of it.

"A good cigar—a big, fat, black fellow!" he laughed. "Then, the world would be complete." His glance interpreted his meaning.

"I never attempted to chew tobacco but once in my life. I was only a little fellow visiting my grandmother's. The gardener provided it, or rather I took it from his workbench. Just as I settled down to prove to myself that I was a man grandmother called me into the house. I was caught. In my fear I swallowed the cud." He made a wry face and then went on in a dreamy way: "During the storm—whether it was last night or the night before, I can't remember—I thought if I could only get a piece of tobacco to chew there was no storm that blew that could put me down. Funny, wasn't it?"

Emily was silent, nor did Paul seem to notice it. She could think only of what his stress of mind must have been during those long black hours.

It was his last personal reference that evening to what had happened during the two nights and a day of the Daphne's war with the sea. She felt that he did not wish to speak of it. Nor did she.

"As soon as the stars come out I am going to find out where we are——" Emily interrupted him with a laugh. "Where the Daphne is," he added, catching her thought, and joining her laugh.

She was standing beside him, looking out through the galley door at the setting sun. He stooped and kissed the crown of her head reverently.

He told her presently that it was more important to put the bark in a condition to get away from where she was than to find out where she was. One thing was certain: the Daphne had plenty of sea room. The weather promised fair and therewith he summoned all his strength to take advantage of it.

While Emily busied herself about the galley, Paul renewed the fire under the donkey boiler.

"Bully old crew," he said to the engine and patting its piston in the familiar way men come to treat inanimate things which serve them. "Only you can't go aloft. You can set sail, but you can't furl it. But you're not going to fail us. You won't, will you?"

He was starting aft to fill the lamps there when Emily came to the engine room door. The impulse of action that was driving him was in her, too.

"Only give me something to do, Paul, and I'll do it just like a real sailorman."

"Keep your eye on this steam gauge. When it goes to sixty, open the fire door. It mightn't be a bad idea if you learned to sound the ship. There's the sounding rod on that hook. You will find the well between the pumps. Come. I'll show you."

A half-foot of water was sloshing in the port alleyway and in and out of the rooms opening upon it as Paul entered the cabin. He found the plug of a scupper just inside the door and pulled it out. Glancing out on deck, he saw the vent of another scupper. He located this in the mate's room. As he pulled the plug free and withdrew his hand a sheet of paper stuck to it. Half curiously he carried it into the after saloon where he filled the lamps which would be most useful. It was some writing of the poor Sussex lad's, was his thought. As he lighted the first lamp the paper caught his eye again. He picked it up. The first line startled him and led his eyes leaping through the rest of the water-blurred text in a breathless comprehension.

Paul Lavelle read this wonderful document a second and even a third time. It was epic in his sight. He really had no distinct thought. His mind was whelmed by awe of the character of the gold woman which the wet sheet of paper revealed. There came to him a picture of her writing at the desk in Elston's room on the evening of the day they had come aboard the Daphne. It was then that she had written this will. He kissed the paper because it seemed part of her and then tore it into little bits.

Emily was withdrawing the sounding rod from the well when Paul returned to the deck. Plainly she was in distress.

"I'm afraid, Paul, I'm a poor sailor," she said as he came to her side. "I can't tell anything from this."

"You sounded as the ship rolled. The way to do is to wait until she comes on an even keel. Like this. Now."

A moment later he hauled the rod out and gasped in dread. It showed four and one-half feet of water in the Daphne's hold!

There surged through him a second later the rage with which he had met and fought the storm. Here was a new and unexpected gage of battle. It swept from him the last vestige of pain and fatigue. Instantly the suggestion of flame, characteristic of the man in action, marked his every movement.

"She's an iron vessel with a coal cargo," he hurriedly told Emily. "If the storm has strained her——" A mist came into his eyes and he glanced overside. "That cursed sea isn't going to get you! It isn't! Come on!"

Emily exhibited but a momentary apprehension of danger. The joy of working with Paul in a freely admitted equality swept it away. The only recognition of her femininity was his insistence upon her wearing a pair of gloves which he had brought from McGavock's room.

Together they got the pumps rigged to the donkey engine and started them sucking two black streams out of the hold.

"Two hours will tell us whether the enemy's in force or not—maybe sooner," Paul said as he left Emily to go about the ship with a lantern to discover if possible if the Daphne had sprung a leak in her topsides. When he came to the fore hatch his hopes lifted at the thought that the sea might have entered here through the uncalked and untarpaulined covers. It was a dreary tangle of hamper which met his gaze in this part of the vessel. For an instant he was puzzled to observe that everything he touched left a black, oily smear. He crawled up under the forecastle head and there found what he considered an explanation of the Daphne's survival. Two barrels of engine oil were lashed to the heel of the bowsprit. One of these had been sprung by the storm and was still weeping its contents upon the deck. It was this oil running out of the hawse pipes and the scuppers which had calmed the bark's tempestuous way.

This discovery relieved Paul's mind. He had felt compelled to believe that at times during the storm either he or the vessel had been bewitched. In all his long experience he had never seen a vessel make such good weather of things as the Daphne. If he had been in command with a full crew under him he would have poured out oil just as accident had done it. Going aft he paused to tell Emily about the oil and to report everything apparently tight forward.

"A barrel of oil didn't stand for more than thirty hours' steering, did it?" she asked, with pride flashing from her eyes.

In silence Paul went on aft to complete his examination of the ship. It felt strange to have a champion. He found the cabins practically free of water. Everything seemed tight. He stopped for a second in the derelict's door.

"Poor old fellow was out of his head," he muttered. There came to him a picture of the stranger's departure. The loss of this man, with only a flicker of life and mind in him, was but a small thing compared with the destruction of the four-master and all hands in the fullness of strength. But the thought of the derelict moved Paul with a great tenderness. This man had known his father.

"He believed I was 'The Prince,'" he mused. "Well, father, if there's any way of knowing—and I'm sure there must be—you know I've tried to play the game squarely."

An unsettling thought broke in upon this. What had made him think that the derelict was Driscoll, a quartermaster of the Yakutat? He shut his mind against what he believed was a vagary. There was no doubt that he must have been out of his senses many times during the storm.

Making his way through the lounge to the poop he paused to examine the sextant. It was undamaged. It made him think of the chronometer. He hurried below to the chart room and wound it and then went forward.

The pumps were still bringing forth their two black streams. Emily stood beside them oiling their bearings with the touch of an engineer.

"I can't make out where this water is coming from. Either she's strained or it pounded in through the fore hatch," he told her. "Everything about deck seems all right. I've looked overside, too. Everything seems all right there. Her masts went clear of her. How did you manage to close that bulkhead door all alone?"

"I don't know, Paul," she answered frankly. She winced. "I don't know where I found the strength to do it. The whole sea was coming in, it seemed. I remember I was very angry. But I have been thinking about the stranger——" Her eyes filled with tears. "Could it be that I—I shut him out in the night—in that——"

"No, no, dear, put that thought away from you forever. He was gone beyond human aid or recall before you got below. I remember your going away from the wheel to do something. You had hardly closed the lounge door when——Let us not think of it."

"Let us shut out every thought of those two nights, dear, as long as we can. Shut it out with the past. Soon enough black nights like that will come between us. Won't you try?"

As Paul spoke he took one of her gloved hands and patted it. There was an appeal in his gaze: a flash of the old pain which she had been praying she might never see in those gray eyes again.

With a quick smile he turned away and went forward. She watched him until he disappeared through the door of the sail room in the port side of the forward house.

In less than two hours there was a sudden cessation of the black streams from below and a weird moaning of the pumps where their plungers pounded emptily.

The gold woman sent this cry forward, and as she did so she cut off the steam as she had seen Paul do. She thrilled at the sight of the engine stopping at the touch of her small hand. She was laughing as he came to the engine room door and saw what she had done.

The engine stopped instantly at the word of command. "We're all right, Emily. That water must have pounded through the fore hatch."

She met him with a laugh of sheer joy which made her even white teeth gleam. It was joy at the lifting of the cloud which had fallen upon both of them at the discovery that the Daphne might have sprung a leak. It was joy, too, that comprehended an ability to do things with her hands.

"I think I should rather be engineer than mate, Paul. It is a lot of fun making this engine go and stop."

"You will have an opportunity to be mate, engineer, and midshipmite in another couple of hours. We are going to have a bit of a moon to-night and I am going to get as much sail bent as possible."

Under the stimulation of some strong coffee they began immediately afterward to bend sail. With the donkey engine's aid it seemed ridiculously easy to snake the heavy rolls of canvas out of the sail room and hoist them aloft. Emily, with a woman's natural quickness, had the trick of using the hoisting drums in perfect control five minutes after Paul explained it to her. It did not surprise him nor was this so because of any personal reason. She thought when he told her that she was as good a working force as any two sailors and better than as many men landlubbers, that it was but an impulse of his natural kindness cheering her.

"Not a bit taffy, dear," said he, noting her doubt. "Every word true. Only thing a woman lacks is bull strength and perhaps judgment in personal matters."

"No, but what I said is quite true," he continued seriously. "You can take a woman or girl or boy and in one trick at a wheel teach them to steer better than men who have spent a lifetime at sea."

Emily got that pleasure out of the tasks in which she helped which comes to one working under the direction of another who knows what he is about. Nothing seemed too hard; nothing seemed hard enough. The will of the man was inspiring. As she watched him climbing aloft or dropping below along a shroud or backstay it seemed impossible to believe that he had been down and helpless but a few hours before.

The moon came to light their work. By about 10 o'clock they had bent a new foresail, a new spanker, and new boom jib.

"That much will give us another little lease on this world," Paul said as he called quits for the night. "To-morrow morning we'll get a couple more rags on her, after some fashion."

But his work was not done. The while Emily prepared a snack of supper he went aft and took two stellar observations. The reckoning that they gave him was, indeed, startling. The Daphne was five hundred and eighty-five miles northeast of her last position! The navigator could hardly believe his eyes. He took a third set of observations. The result was the same. There had been times during the storm when he had realized that the Daphne was driving with terrific speed. But he had anticipated nothing like this. Yet in this moment the sight of her clean clipper underbody came to him as he had seen it the morning he and the gold woman swam out from the Isle of Hope. Allowances for the distance made from the first noon until the time the storm had struck the Daphne and of her drift all that day gave him the wonderful speed average of more than sixteen knots an hour while the storm lasted. Still doubt lingered until he drew out of his memory a day's work of the famous clipper Flying Cloud—433¼ statute miles from noon to noon.

The Daphne, by this reckoning, was lying in the great circle sailing track of vessels bound from the Japan coast toward San Francisco and Puget Sound. All thought of trying to make the Hawaiian Islands left him. The California coast lay less than three thousand miles to the eastward. The prevailing winds in this track from then on would be from the west and northwest. The Daphne, with fair weather, should be able to make this distance in a month. If no vessel should rescue them they could win home in that time.

"Oh, you Daphne packet!" he cried in glee as he hurried forward to tell Emily the good news. He went with a snatch of "The Dreadnaught" bursting from him.

"'With everything drawing aloft and alow
She's a Liverpool packet! Lord God see her go!'"

Emily was on the point of going to the galley door to call him when she caught that bit of heart-lifting song. A wild, compelling note of the sea was in it.

"We're homeward bound in a clipper ship, lassie!" he called as he discovered her. Nor would he eat or drink until he had told her where the storm had carried the Daphne and what it meant to them. He was like a big, wholesome boy and she told him so. His enthusiasm stirred her with a desire to be under way immediately. The Daphne became personal in the gold woman's thoughts as Paul described her capabilities, and therewith she understood the love of a man for a ship which women rarely do.

"Unless we're picked up by some other vessel we'll be up with the Golden Gate in less than a month!"

Emily's face clouded at the suggestion of another vessel rescuing them. Paul laughed.

"You may not understand, but I wish we might sail the Daphne into our own home port. Think what a prize it would mean to you."

A hope lived in his heart for an instant that this might come true. It was gone when he answered her.

"The first vessel that comes along we go in her, lassie; and leave the Daphne to the sea."

Yet as Emily lay down in the lounge a little while later and saw Paul hang a light of distress in the mizzen rigging, the strange wish that it would go unseen was uppermost in her heart. She wanted the Daphne to remain his, but she would not admit to herself the reason upon which that hope was predicated.

CHAPTER XXX

With the first streak of day Paul was on deck. The blow-off of the donkey, which he had set at a low pressure a couple of hours before, roused him from the berth he had stretched along the carpenter's bench. Custom trains seafarers as it does soldiers on campaign to live by a broken sleep which the average workaday citizen thinks would kill him. Although Paul had been up at intervals during the night, with an eye for the weather and any chance lights, he was filled with an eager freshness. A stirring was coming out of the northwest. There was a tang in it which promised a whole sail breeze. It put a song in his heart, and a little while later Emily was awakened by his clear voice ringing through the morning air, "The Chanty of the Rio Grande."

"'Where are you going to, my pretty maid?
O away Rio!
  Where are you going to, my pretty maid?
We are bound to the Rio Grande.
O away Rio,
O away Rio,
  O fare you well, my bonny young girl,
  We are bound to the Rio Grande.'"

"Why didn't you call me, Paul?" she asked in a tone of protest, and she waited archly in expectancy of a kiss, but he did not seem to notice this. "Partners must play fair."

"Never mind, Emily. I can do so little for you. From now on it will be watch and watch and there will not be much that I can do for you."

The bending of a new fore upper topsail and straightening out the tangle of running gear about decks occupied most of the forenoon. It was not until after luncheon that the Daphne, with Emily at the wheel, lifted away to the eastward before a fresh northwesterly breeze.

Paul ran aft as the bark entered upon her task and stood for a moment beside Emily. The intoxication which she had first experienced alone at the wheel was again upon her. The breeze was dusting loose wisps of her hair into a halo which the sun burnished with fire. Bosom heaving, eyes alight, her whole virgin being alive, a-thrill with love and the sensation of the Daphne's motion, she presented a figure which would have given fame to any brush that could have limned it. She might have been Daphne herself, not fleeing from, but hastening with her fresh treasures to meet Apollo.

Paul felt that he dare not speak. He put his hand on the wheel to haul the bark half a point closer to the wind. As he drew it away Emily touched it impulsively.

Their eyes met in a flash in which her soul called to his and trembled when echo only seemed to answer it.

Paul turned abruptly away to stray the patent log over the taffrail. Then he went forward in silence. When he found himself a few minutes later staring out over the weather bow he wondered how he had gotten there. And the gold woman, watching him until he disappeared, kissed the wheel spoke his hand had touched and even again in the sweet agony of her love when she saw that it was flecked with the blood of his storm travail.

That evening Paul established the rule by which he thought it best to work the ship. Emily would stand a watch and trick at the wheel of two hours and have three hours below. His watch would be three on deck and two below.

"It is fair, Emily. I wish I might spare you every bit of the coarse hard things you have to do."

"Take your orders or go to your room," he said with a pretended seriousness. Emily started with a gasp. Her thoughts leaped to McGovern's story of what had happened on the bridge of the Yakutat. This was what Graham had said to Paul that fateful night.

"Why, dear, what is the matter? I didn't mean to frighten you. I'm a ruffian. Do forgive me."

"No, you should forgive me. I had no right to question what you said. You know best."

"I've been away from civilization so long that I imagine that I've forgotten how to speak decently to white folk."

"Then I should like to send ever so many men that I know at home where you have been."

"I am. I have just been reborn. Oh, Paul, I have never lived until now. I have never known what life meant. I have lived as one blind, incompetent, thoughtless. Like most of those I knew before you came into my life I had just a vague notion that the earth was round. You know the kind."

"Yes. Take the fiction of civilization away from them and every nine hundred and ninety-nine would perish overnight."

"I saw them in extremity aboard the Cambodia. How many knew one end of a boat from the other? They were all thinking of living, crying to live, and hardly one out of ten knew what to do to save their most precious possession—life."

The question was addressed to the sea as much as it was to Emily. She shuddered.

"Here!" he exclaimed brusquely. "What are we doing? There is Polaris up there smiling at you, my lady."

His face was lit with a wonderful smile as he spoke. It drove the gloom from her mind which their reference to the Cambodia had produced. Soon they were off on an expedition to the stars, each in turn naming one and identifying its bearings. Paul had introduced Emily to this "game" the second night on the island, and then as now they lost themselves in it in a childish delight. His mental equipment was forever startling the gold woman. Where he had found the time to garner the store of knowledge that was his and to keep abreast of the times, leading such a life as he had for ten years, was a marvel to her.

"Ha! Ha!" Paul laughed suddenly as the cabin clock, which he had moved into the lounge, struck two bells. The laugh broke the spell of the stars which held Emily, only to weave her immediately in another.

"'I have shot back to Paris!'"

"'Come—pardon me—by the last waterspout,
  Covered with ether,—accident of travel!
  My eyes still full of star-dust, and my spurs
  Encumbered by the planets' filaments!
  Ha! on my doublet! A comet's hair!'"

As he finished this snatch from Cyrano de Bergerac's sky-traveling tale, Paul pretended to pick a comet's hair from his sleeve.

"Oh, my beloved 'Cyrano'!" exclaimed Emily, identifying the lines. "Do go on," and in answer Paul went through the entire scene between Cyrano and De Guiche.

"And I will applaud—I will pay you thus," and the gold woman reached up and kissed the helmsman on brow and lip.

Thus they both came back from across the world and the four centuries whither the magic of the romantic lines had transported them.

"Come, Emily, didn't you hear two bells strike? You have let me waste nearly an hour of your watch below. Turn in."

She held her mouth up to be kissed. His lips barely touched hers and flashed away, and as she went through the lounge door, he murmured, still in the words of his Gascon hero, "'I soon shall reach the moon.'"

Fifteen days later the gold woman was at the wheel again, having relieved Paul to permit him to make his noon observations. It was a Sunday. She watched him tremulously, and strangely troubled, where he worked at the chart table in the lounge.

The days that had passed had been those of which sea-singers make their happiest, bravest songs—by sunlight azure, cloudless sky, and wind-flecked, gem-shot, purple sea; by night an ermine-tipped deep, mirroring the star jewels and planet studdings of mystic, violet heavens. Through these halcyon days the Daphne had been winging her way ever eastward; flinging long sea leagues behind under the impulse of a driving, northwesterly wind. It had been as constant as a mother's love; with never a pause the bark had sped as she was speeding now, not as a hand-made fabric of steel and iron and wood and canvas and brass, but like a living, sensate thing into which her maker had breathed a soul. The crispness of Spring was in the air—air which whipped the blood like young wine.

As he spoke Emily saw him rise quickly from the table and come toward her. The mask of joyousness which he wore was but a mask to her. It might have deceived anybody else, but this girl had come to understand him and read him as not even the woman who had borne him could have done. There was a constraint upon him. With each noon's tale of a shortening journey a relentless tide had seemed to carry him further and further away from her. After the first flush of the homeward flight he had sung no more of his sea songs unless she asked him. He had a guard up. A secret fear seemed to be gnawing at his heart. By instinct alone she read that he loved her; not by external signs.

"This is a smart little packet," Paul went on. "Just think of it—one thousand nine hundred and eighty miles in fifteen days! That's moving with nothing above a crippled mainto'-galluns'l on her! We did eleven knots for a stretch when that puff struck us at dawn this morning."

"'She's a saucy wild packet; she's a packet of fame,
She belongs in New York and the Dreadnaught's her name.'"

With this couplet, singing it in her rich voice, as she had learned it from Paul, Emily made her answer. She did it with a bravery and pretense of light-heartedness which she was far from feeling.

"At this rate we'll not be spending another Sunday aboard the Daphne, partner. Eh?"

"No," she said and she kept her eyes averted as he took the wheel from her. She looked out over the lee rail and across the sea. Just over the end of the spanker boom, where it wheeled low down on the southwestern horizon, a white glint fixed her gaze. For a second she thought it was a large bird. Guiltily she held her breath as she discovered it to be a sail. She closed her eyes and afterwards she believed that in that moment she had prayed that Paul might not see it. But he had followed her gaze. Her heart went cold as she heard him cry: "Sail ho!"

"It's a ship! Those are her skys'ls or royals we can see! She's bound this way!"

Emily's hands faltered. The wheel rolled through them. The Daphne clawed up in the wind until she was nearly aback forward.

Blindly Emily recovered herself and put the helm up. The Daphne fell off before the wind and her skipper turned again to the strange sail.

"No," he said. "She's outward bound—going the other way. We could never overtake her." He took the wheel again. "Better look at her, partner. It's a full-rigged ship. Not many of 'em left. Pretty soon the sea will know them no more. They'll be gone—like—like the dreams of yesterday."

In a few minutes the outward-bounder dipped out of sight, but even before she went a mist had shut her from Emily's vision. "Dreams of yesterday," her thoughts kept repeating.

Although the Daphne had been lying along in a beaten track of vessels for more than two weeks, this was the first sail to be sighted from her decks—the first vessel to come within her ken since the four-master with the painted ports had "arrived out."

"Don't feel badly, Emily," Paul said as the gold woman faced him. "Any hour may bring us up with a homeward-bounder."

"I do not feel badly," she answered, and her pride helped her mask her feelings. "But if we are going to be home by next Sunday we are going to have one more 'picnic.'"

With that she went forward to the galley. The preceding Sunday she had prepared a luncheon for both of them and they had eaten it at the wheel together. They had prepared for it a day ahead, talking childish make-believes of what they would wear and of the good things they would have to eat. Paul had stolen the time to shave. Emily had found a bit of pink ribbon and put it in her hair. This had been their change of apparel. Such a meal as the cheap, sea-sour provisions of the Daphne afforded had been the "picnic" luncheon of their fiction.

But Saturday of this week had slipped by and neither had spoken of a repetition. Emily had waited for Paul to say something. He had waited for her. Yet now he noted as she went forward that there was a bit of ribbon in her hair. And she had observed that morning when he had come on deck to relieve her at 10 o'clock that he was freshly shaven.

Of a sudden Emily paused in the midst of her "picnic" preparations, her mind stumbling upon the strangest thought that had yet come to her of Paul's inexplicable mood.

Instantly there came to her mind the night on the Isle of Hope when she had heard him murmur in unconsciousness of a woman to whom he would soon come home.

"Cherchez la femme." Nothing was truer than that. Always the woman. Her thoughts went wild. They began picturing the sort of woman who might have come into his life and who might be coming back into it. No; she would never come back into it, for if she had let him go when the blow fell, he was not the kind to let her back. Still love moved men in strange ways.

It was a sorry picnic that was spread on the Daphne's deck. It came to an end at 2 o'clock when Paul turned the wheel over to Emily and started forward with the dishes they had used.

"But it's Sunday, you know," said Emily, making a brave effort to smile. There was an invitation in her glance for him to remain, but he would not see it.

"'Six days shalt thou work, doing all that thou art able; and on the seventh, holystone the decks and stow away the cable.'"

He smiled as he quoted the sea-grimed lines which the first shell back on the Ark must have turned. Then slowly he put down the dishes and irresistibly—a powerful magnet might have been controlling him—he was drawn aft to the gold woman. He took her face between his hands and kissed her as he had kissed her that day in the lounge. She dropped the wheel and staggered.

Just as the Daphne was striking aback the madness which was upon Lavelle passed from him and he seized the wheel. As he sent her off before the wind again the back draught of the shaking sails wafted to him a sulphurous odor which chilled the last drop of blood in his veins.

The pallor of death was in his face. Another scent of gaseous warning struck him.

CHAPTER XXXI

Paul ran straight from the poop into the eyes of the Daphne. There the trail of gas led him. It was the coal in the fore hatch that had been exposed and wet. He went below through the chain locker, but only to remain a second. A sulphurous wave of heat drove him on deck, choking for breath. A furnace was back of it. There was no fire to be seen, but this man did not have to see it to know what the blast that repulsed him meant. He knew these Australian coal cargoes too well. This was not the result of the mutineers' abortive effort to destroy the Daphne. This was a fire of spontaneous combustion. It was deeply seated. These coals had been in the bark more than one hundred and sixteen days to his own knowledge, which was drawn from the log and the time since he had boarded her. How long she had lain in Sydney after being loaded there was no way of telling.

Coals of this kind, laden in hulls like the Daphne's, which were never built for such cargoes, generate gas after a certain period, and unless watched incessantly and ventilated properly fire is the certain result. The Pacific deeps hold the secret of many a ship brought to her doom through such a lading.

That night the constant northwesterly summoned a new freshness to its drive as if it sensed the Daphne's peril. When Paul relieved Emily at the wheel at seven o'clock she was crying with the pain in her arms. She had been standing there a full five hours. Not since they had been sailing to the eastward had Paul permitted her to take a trick beyond two hours. She had to walk up and down the deck swinging her arms and flexing her fingers to get the numbness out of them.

"Emily, I'd suffer any pain to take yours away," Paul said. "I feel like a whipped cur to see you going through all this terror and hardship—and to think I can't do anything to put any of it away from you."

His tenderness flooded her eyes with tears. Strife always brought him close to her.

"Don't, Paul, please," she said bravely, attempting to control her voice. "You will—you will have me breaking—going to pieces in a moment."

She put her hands to her face and leaned against the casing over the steering gear.

"Emily, I want you to get for'ard and get a bite to eat and then turn in," he said. "I'm going to try to let you sleep for three hours—maybe until midnight. I've everything battened down forward. The fire's all there. Not a sign aft—no temperature. It's this wind and our strength against the beast that's under decks."

The morning of the fifth day after the discovery of the fire Paul fixed the Daphne's position one hundred and fifty miles to the south and west of San Francisco.

"Only another day, partner! Maybe an hour may bring a vessel to us!" She had just relieved him at the wheel. Through these five days the Daphne had come driving without sighting a sail: unspoken save by the voice of the northwest wind. Once they had seen the black smoke plume of an outward-bound steamer, but it was too far away for the Daphne's signal of distress to be seen.

Paul seemed to be living by will alone: to be endowed of a force that only death could stay. When he slept the gold woman had no idea. He had relieved her at the wheel every two hours, night and day, but when she was steering she frequently heard him at work in the engine room. From the very first night he had slept beside that engine, kept its fires alive and a stream of steam flowing into the forehold through a pipe led down through the chain locker. He had explained to her that water on a fire like this would have been of as little use as oil: that gases had to be smothered.

Emily sensed that a greater danger menaced them than Paul had revealed. This had been suggested to her when on the second day she had seen him finish a raft built of doors and forecastle bunkboards. But she had learned of the storm not to ask questions. What this man chose to tell he would tell.

Never had he seemed more splendid than as he stood before her this morning telling the Daphne's position, and in the same breath whispering again the belief that had come to him the night before that the steam was choking the beast in the hold. Bare-armed, bareheaded, lithe with a thoroughbred's suppleness, he was, in her sight, an urn of the divine fire from which mankind draws its noblest impulses.

"We'll win through yet, Paul! In justice we must!" she called to him as he went forward.

She saw him come to the galley door a few minutes later with a cup of steaming coffee and, as he ate of a biscuit and drank, he waved to her. He darted inside and a moment later came running aft with a cup for her.

"Half a dozen cups won't hurt you. I put two spoons of sugar in this—sand, save the mark."

With that he was gone from her again. Emily watched him breaking coal out of a corner of the main hatch for use in the donkey. She smiled as she remembered his commentary on the grimness of stealing coal from one end of the ship to make fire to put out coal already afire in the other end. It was the old, old principle of fighting fire with fire in a new, weird form.

Watching her partner drew Emily's attention from the Daphne. A warning slat of the weather leech of the to'galluns'l brought her eyes back to the bark and the compass. She had just succeeded in getting the vessel on her course of northeast again, when a roar with a shriek whistling through it came bursting aft. A cloud of steam poured from the engine room door.

Shrieking Paul's name, Emily paused but a second when no answer came. She became a flame of action. With the quickness of thought and the instinct of his training guiding her hands, she snapped the wheel into its beckets, let the spanker sheet go by the run and, leaping forward, cast the halyards off their pin.

Only belching steam answered her cry of Paul. Into it she hurled herself. It flung her back. She became as a tigress at the repulse. She was not to be denied. Instinct brought her to her hands and knees. It told her to go in under the scalding vapor. Just inside the door she found her own and snatched him into the life-giving air.

When Paul awoke to consciousness fifteen minutes later it was to find the face of the gold woman bending over him. He put up his arms and drew her face down against his hot lips and held it there.

"You, you," he murmured, and he found the precious lips which had kissed him again and again in his unconsciousness. They answered him as if they would breathe the strength of immortal life into his form.

"Not even death can take you from me!" she cried, and started up savagely. She might have expected to find the grim specter himself to grapple at her side.

Lavelle sighed and his eyes closed in a seeming weariness of pain. His arms fell from her neck.

It was an appeal, a command, a challenge of defiance. The cry with which she sent it heavenward pierced above the roar of the steam and the warring sails and hamper above.

Although this lone woman's extremity was great, yet of her association with Paul Lavelle she had learned to order her wits in the presence of disaster.

"If the next minute seems to be the last, just keep on fighting—hammering ahead," he had said to her so many times.

She remembered how he had given strychnine to McGovern to stimulate heart action—the oil he had put on the poor fellow's burns. She ran aft and in a drawer in the medicine chest which she looted of bandages and lint she discovered by accident a bottle of brandy. When she returned to Paul he was just opening his eyes again. He shook his head at the liquor when he had taken but a sip of it.

Emily found a bottle of glycerine. A few minutes after he had swallowed a mouthful of it he nodded that he felt easier.

"Steam—afraid it got inside," he whispered. "Tried—remember keep my mouth shut. Steam's bad to swallow. Water injector—on the boiler—blew out. Hit me somewhere in the middle. Happened all in a second."

He fainted while Emily was drawing the boot off his left leg which he had indicated hurt him most. The limb was scalded from the knee down. His arms and the backs of his hands, too, were blistered. His face was grimed with ashes and soot, but when Emily washed it she found it free of burn or hurt. The while her loving hands swathed him and soothed his wounds she crooned like a wild thing over its whelp.

When he revived she was holding his head in her lap just as she had in the Cambodia's boat. His eyelids lifted to her kisses. He put up a hand and touched her cheek and she patted it. He smiled at the reassurance that it was not a dream. Many, many times he had awakened to put out his hand like that—to touch that face and met only emptiness.

The jade ring which he had put on Emily's finger drew his glance and held it for a second.

"'Man has many reckonings with man, but only one with God,'" he repeated. "'Only one with God.'"

The escaping steam by this time had spent its strongest volume. It was now no more than a hiss. The Daphne had fallen off before the wind again and the noise aloft had practically ceased.

"And for the touch of those lips," Paul went on, "the reckoning—cannot be too hard."

"No, no, dearheart——No, no! This is not the reckoning—only the beginning of the future."

"I have thought of the future, but it can't be—for me. If things had been different I should have found you though you had been at the ends of the world. And I should have come for you and taken you." A flash of the old conquering spirit lit his eyes. "I should have taken you despite a world against me. It is part of the—the reckoning that we should—have met; like strange ships on the sea and to have sailed together for this little while. But it wasn't to be that we were to get home together. And that is right. That is right."

"But I don't want to live," he answered very calmly. "I am nothing but a worthless, broken thing—marked among men. I haven't even a name to give you. I am a pariah man—darling. That's——"

"Listen, Paul—look up at me so that you will know that it is my soul speaking to you. All that fortune has given me is as nothing to just the glance with which you are looking up at me now. All that I have is yours—my soul, my flesh, my blood, my every breath, my life! Had you nowhere to lay your head I would follow you. Had you only rags to cover me I would wear them as robes of state. Had you only a crust from the gutter to share with me it would be a feast. Were the whole world to revile you its scorn would make me proud. I would wear its spittle like jewels. My love would be my crown."

Emily Granville was burning with the divine fire of a sublime love. Her message to this man, who to her was more than all the earth and its treasures—more than life itself, burst from her lips with the passionate rush of a mountain stream seeking the ocean.

"Can you not understand that my love would be a poor weak, despicable thing if this were not so? That I would not be worthy of my womanhood?"

She choked back the tears as she asked these questions; she kissed the face which she pressed against her breast.

"That you might live—I would die with a smile and with but one regret: That it had not been permitted to me to bear a man child like you.

"But there is a future, Paul. The world will not drive us forth. Life—a fine, clean, God-fearing life is waiting for us over there—just through the Golden Gate. It is a golden gate which will close out the past—forever and ever."

"But it can. I can lock it out. The world must listen to me. It must believe me. Justice works in strange ways, but it brought us that poor man out of the sea. I can tell the world his story. He was with you on the Yakutat."

"Then, it was not a vagary," he whispered. "That was Driscoll—the quartermaster."

"He was in the boat with you that night. I don't know what name you knew him by. But he told me what happened—the truth. Had he never spoken I should have known the truth. If the world would not listen to you, it will listen to me! It will take back its lies! If——"

Emily's voice broke and she lowered her head in the embrace of the wounded arms which encircled her neck. The pent-up tears of all her travail of spirit since their paths had crossed—the tears choked back and fought back through the dark hours of all the weeks that had gone—would not be longer stayed. On his breast she poured them, and her one thought was that if death must be her love's victor it would strike them quickly in each other's arms.

CHAPTER XXXII

"In the Black Ball Line I served my time,
To me hoodah. To me hoodah;
In the Black Ball Line I served my time,
So hurrah for the Black Ball Line!

"Blow, my bullies, blow,
For California O!
There's plenty of gold,
So I've been told,
On the banks of the Sacramento!"

It was with this familiar capstan chanty, "The Banks of the Sacramento," ringing into his senses that Paul Lavelle opened his eyes again on conscious life. The chorus rose clear and lusty, following a baritone leader whose tones were like chimes. A strange, sharp voice of command near by suddenly cut into the chorus.

"Tell that gang of bullies to cut that out and handle that capstan in silence! Tell 'em to remember we've sick folk aboard here."

"Emily, Emily!" Paul called. He believed he shouted, but his voice rose hardly above a whisper. A shadow cut off the morning sunlight which was streaming through a door at his feet. A film seemed to be over his vision, but he sensed that he was in the Daphne's lounge. Somebody sat down beside him and two strong hands took one of his between them.

Emotion choked the speaker, but Paul Lavelle started at the sound of that voice. It called to him across fourteen years of silence. He looked up dazed at a man built like himself and dressed in the uniform of a United States naval commander.

"She's below, Paul, sleeping. She's been up here, sitting where I am, nearly all night."

"I've a lot to tell that'll make you want to live; that ought to bring you off your back quicker than you can say Jack Robinson," Winterton went on. "You haven't swallowed any steam—you're burned up a bit outside and you're just as good-looking as ever."

"You're aboard your own bark—the Daphne. She's yours by the Lord Harry and I'd like to see anybody take her away from you. We'll be up with the Gate in another three hours. I'm having her mudhooks shackled up now. Along——"

"Let 'em go on," he asked. "Ask that fellow with the baritone voice to find a job and give us 'The Maid of Amsterdam.'"

He lifted the hand which Winterton held and gave it a gentle squeeze through its bandages. He turned and went out quickly. Winterton picked up the hand again and met Paul's wondering gaze.

The strain of "The Maid of Amsterdam"—the most beautiful of all sailor work songs—came aft.

"That can't stop me," Winterton went on. "We ran afoul of your old packet about 11 o'clock yesterday morning, threshing around like a wild ship—two ships of the cruiser squadron; mine and another. The Carolina has gone on in. I'm stretching a hawser over your bows with my ship. Don't you remember anything about it? No? I sent Yates and a boat's crew aboard of you. They found you and that glorious girl trying to get aft. You wanted to get to the wheel and you not able to stand. Don't remember it, eh? I reckon you don't.

"Oh, my boy, that girl and you have had the whole lot of us miserable. We reached Honolulu from Callao ten days after the Cambodia went down. Department ordered us to join the search for survivors. Whaler picked up a hundred and forty. There was a kid of a quartermaster among 'em—he and a chap named Evans—he's in the consular service—were the heroes of the whole lot. It would take me a week to tell you the things they said about you. They weren't the only ones. To me it was like a poor man finding gold—every word they dropped was a chunk of gold. Say, don't mind, if I snivel a little bit. But I'm glad, glad! You under—you old——"

"Got a cable from her at Honolulu. Sent a wireless to her last night. She's waiting for you now in town. Cambodia had no wireless. 'Twas a crime. Somebody ought to be hanged."

"Well, we combed out to the westward looking for you till it was hopeless," Winterton resumed. "We had nothing but gale upon gale. We combed through that chain of islands to the nor'west of the Hawaiians and at Midway we ran on the gang out of this ship. Oh, it isn't a pretty story: They'd made the island after being in the boats ten days. When they set fire to this ship they thought Midway was right aboard of them. None was a navigator. Second mate—a murdering hound named Morgan, who'd been taken aft from the foc'sle, was the ringleader. He killed McGavock, the skipper. The Jap cook killed the mate. Plain hellishness was at the back of it; that's all.

"McGavock had been logging both of them—knocked Morgan down one day for giving him back talk. Mate did the same to the cook. The Jap was crazy from opium smoking. After they'd done the killing they fixed the fire and the rest of the crew followed them over the side like rats—you know the kind. One of the outfit—sort of a third mate and bos'n—who'd put up a fight—they turned him adrift without water or a bite to eat. Told him to eat the oars if he got hungry; gave him the ocean to drink. Yes, that's the fellow you picked up. Miss Granville told me about it last night. He was with your father at Apia."

"She wasn't aboard. Seems poor McGavock lost his wife—died at sea with her little baby, away out to the westward there, a couple of years ago. He kept brooding over it—kept the wife's things aboard just as she'd left them. I saw the little ferns down there under the skylights yesterday evening. Seems that after crossing the line this voyage McGavock got it into his head to make the position where he'd buried the little woman. He had it marked on the chart with a little red cross. The mutineers stole the chart and they thought the red cross stood for an island. God knows why McGavock steered out there. Maybe he never intended to come away.

"The Jap committed suicide at Midway, but he told the whole story before he went out and we have the rest of it from the other swine. The whole outfit's aboard my ship. Something of the poetry of justice in that, eh? A British cruiser's waiting to take them aboard as soon as we get in. Had her by wireless yesterday.

"But, Paul, it's you I want to talk about—and I'll not answer another question till I have my say. When the news of the Cambodia's loss and what you'd done aboard of her went flashing round the world it set the old navy gang's hearts up. But it did more than that. It reached into the conscience of that fellow Graham. He was on his last legs in a hospital in San Francisco. He'd never had a ship since he'd lost the Yakutat—just a beachcomber and a bum. A man can't do a dirty thing and stand up afterward. That's as sure as shooting. Well, with his last breath, Graham tells the truth about the night the Yakutat was lost; said if he'd done what you advised him to do the ship would never have piled up. He took back every lie he uttered on the witness stand—admitted that he'd ordered you to the boats. He even told how he looked down from the bridge and saw you fighting like a tiger to get women and children into the boats. The San Francisco papers—we picked 'em up at Honolulu—are full of it. Miss Granville has a lot of them.

"Lord, man——Why, Paul, you damned old pirate you! The fleet's been collecting a fund—one of the newspapers that roasted you the worst is backing it—to build you a memorial. Something in bronze. But it isn't going to be bronze. It's going to be silver—the damnedest, finest wedding gift a real man ever got."

Winterton's voice was husky with emotion. His big brown eyes were suspiciously misty. He had to stop.

"Farallones are abeam, sir," reported Yates, who was in temporary command of the Daphne, coming to the door.

"Must be getting back to my own ship, Paul. Regulations, you know. But I'll be aboard of you as soon as we get our mudhooks down."

"Carpenter's mate reports, sir," interrupted the ensign, "that the fire in the forehold is extinguished."

"See that!" exclaimed Winterton. "You beat that, too, you old beggar, even though you did come near blowing yourself to Kingdom Come!"

At that moment Emily, fresh from sleep and with the wonderful light of love transcendent in her being, came up through the companionway with the surgeon from Winterton's ship at her heels.

Sawbones caught Winterton's eye and followed him out on deck. The lounge door closed softly behind them and Emily Granville and Paul Lavelle were alone. He drew her precious face down to his and printed a kiss of life triumphant upon her expectant lips. Neither attempted to speak for several minutes.

The gold woman carried a small black book and she laid it in Paul's hands as she lifted her face from his.

"I want you to have this now, my prince, before the world renders you what it will in a few hours. I would have dragged from the world what it is going to give you willingly. I want all that comes to you to come through me. Darling, that is the woman of it. I have kept this a secret from you because I wished to be able to swear that it was not written at your suggestion; that you knew absolutely nothing about it. If I did wrong in keeping it from you—you——"

"Then begin here," and she opened the book in the middle for him and this is what Paul Lavelle read:

"Oh, you wonderful, wonderful woman!" cried Paul as he finished this amazing document and crushed Emily to him.

Contrition filled him as he remembered the picture of her standing beside the derelict's berth swearing him to the truth of his statement. He started to speak, but a hand over his mouth stopped him. The gold woman could read his thoughts.

"I should have answered you when you called me that night, Paul," she said, "but if I had done so I should not have been able to get the poor old fellow to make his mark. I had fought death from taking him until I could put in writing what he said. You——"

Two hours later Paul Lavelle and Emily Granville sailed through the Golden Gate—the golden gate of the future which she had promised him.

The noble sea way was shimmering in the sunlight of a flawless Spring day. As the Daphne came under the lee of the green-clad Marin hills the northwest wind, which had been her constant champion, withdrew like a courtier who has seen his lady to the threshold of her home.

"To live and to love!" exclaimed Paul, inhaling a deep breath of the crisp, sparkling air where he had been carried from the lounge to a chair against the taffrail.

"To love and to live," whispered Emily, pressing the hand which she held in hers against her heart. "Isn't life beautiful?"

THE GIRL OF THE GOLDEN GATE

BY WILLIAM BROWN MELONEY

THE GIRL OF THE GOLDEN GATE

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VII

CHAPTER VIII

CHAPTER IX

CHAPTER X

CHAPTER XI

CHAPTER XII

CHAPTER XIII

CHAPTER XIV

CHAPTER XV

CHAPTER XVI

CHAPTER XVII

CHAPTER XVIII

CHAPTER XIX

CHAPTER XX

CHAPTER XXI

CHAPTER XXII

CHAPTER XXIII

CHAPTER XXIV

CHAPTER XXV

CHAPTER XXVI

CHAPTER XXVII

CHAPTER XXVIII

CHAPTER XXIX

CHAPTER XXX

CHAPTER XXXI

CHAPTER XXXII

THE END