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Those Who Smiled, and Eleven Other Stories

by Perceval Gibbon · English · Gutenberg #23993 · 492,819 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Those Who Smiled, and Eleven Other Stories

Author: Perceval Gibbon


        
Release date: December 26, 2007 [eBook #23993]

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/23993

Credits: E-text prepared by Charles Klingman


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THOSE WHO SMILED, AND ELEVEN OTHER STORIES ***


E-text prepared by Charles Klingman



THOSE WHO SMILED

PERCEVAL GIBBON


      *      *      *      *      *


By the Same Author

   VERSE: African Items

   SHORT STORIES:

   Vrouw Grobelaar's Leading Cases, The Adventures of Miss Gregory,
   The Second-class Passenger

   NOVELS: Souls in Bondage, Salvator, Margaret Harding


      *      *      *      *      *


THOSE WHO SMILED

And Eleven Other Stories

by

PERCEVAL GIBBON







Gassell and Company, LTD London, New York, Toronto and Melbourne

First Published 1920




To

MY SISTER, MURIEL GIBBON





CONTENTS

    1. THOSE WHO SMILED

    2. THE DAGO

    3. WOOD-LADIES

    4. A MAN BEFORE THE MAST

    5. THE GIRL

    6. THE BREADWINNER

    7. "PLAIN GERMAN"

    8. ALMS AND THE MAN

    9. THE DARKENED PATH

   10. MISS PILGRIM'S PROGRESS

   11. THE CONNOISSEUR

   12. THE DAY OF OMENS




I

THOSE WHO SMILED

From the great villa, marble-white amid its yews and cedars, in which
the invaders had set up their headquarters, the two officers the
stout, formidable German captain and the young Austrian lieutenant
went together through the mulberry orchards, where the parched grass
underfoot was tiger-striped with alternate sun and shadow. The hush
of the afternoon and the benign tyranny of the North Italian sun
subdued them; they scarcely spoke as they came through the ranks of
fruit-laden trees to the low embankment where the last houses of the
village tailed out beside the road.

"So ist's gut!" said Captain Hahn then. "We are on time nicely on
time!" He climbed the grassy bank to the road and paused, his tall
young companion beside him. "Halt here," he directed; "we shall see
everything from here."

He suspired exhaustively in the still, strong heat, and took
possession of the scene with commanding, intolerant eyes. He was a
man in the earliest years of middle life, short, naturally
full-bodied, and already plethoric with undisciplined passions and
appetites. His large sanguine face had anger and impatience for an
habitual expression; he carried a thick bamboo cane, with which he
lashed the air about him in vehement gesticulation as he spoke; all
his appearance and manner were an incarnate ejaculation. Beside him,
and by contrast with the violence of his effect, his companion was
eclipsed and insignificant, no more than a shape of a silent young
man, slender in his close-fitting grey uniform, with a swart,
immobile face intent upon what passed.

It was the hour that should crown recent police activities of Captain
Hahn with the arrest of an absconding forced-laborer, who, having
escaped from his slave-gang behind the firing-line on the Piave, had
been traced to his father's house in the village. An Italian
renegade, a discovery of Captain Hahn's, had served in the affair; a
whole machinery of espionage and secret treachery had been put in
motion; and now Lieutenant Jovannic, of the Austrian Army, was to be
shown how the German method ensured the German success. Even as they
arrived upon the road they saw the carefully careless group of
lounging soldiers, like characters on a stage "discovered" at the
rise of the curtain, break into movement and slouch with elaborate
purposelessness to surround the cottage. Their corporal remained
where he was, leaning against a wall in the shade, eating an onion
and ready to give the signal with his whistle; he did not glance
towards the two watching officers. To Lieutenant Jovannic, the
falsity and unreality of it all were as strident as a brass band; yet
in the long vista of the village street, brimful of sun and silence,
the few people who moved upon their business went indifferently as
shadows upon a wall. An old man trudged in the wake of a laden
donkey; a girl bore water-buckets slung from a yoke; a child was
sweeping up dung. None turned a head.

"Sieh' 'mal!" chuckled Captain Harm joyously. "Here comes my Judas!"

From the door of the cottage opposite them, whose opening showed dead
black against the golden glare without, came the renegade, pausing
upon the threshold to speak a last cheery word to those within. Poor
Jovannic, it was at this moment that, to the fantastic and absurd
character of the whole event, as arranged by Captain Hahn, there was
now added a quality of sheer horror. The man upon the threshold was
not like a man; vastly pot-bellied, so that the dingy white of his
shirt was only narrowly framed by the black of his jacket, swollen in
body to the comic point, collarless, with a staircase of unshaven
chins crushed under his great, jovial, black-mustached face, the
creature yet moved on little feet like a spinning-top on its point,
buoyantly, with the gait of a tethered balloon. He had the gestures,
the attitude upon the threshold, of a jolly companion; when he
turned, his huge, fatuous face was amiable, and creased yet with the
dregs of smiles. From the breast of his jacket he exhumed a white
handkerchief. "Arrivederci!" he called for the last time to the
interior of the house; someone within answered pleasantly; then
deliberately, with a suggestion of ceremonial and significance in the
gesture, he buried the obscenity of his countenance in the
handkerchief and blew his nose as one blows upon a trumpet.

"Tadellos!" applauded Captain Hahn enthusiastically. "He invented
that signal himself; he's the only man in the village who carries a
handkerchief. Und jetzt geht's los!"

And forthwith it went 'los'; the farce quickened to drama. A couple
of idle soldiers, rifle-less and armed only with the bayonets at
their belts, had edged near the door; others had disappeared behind
the house; Judas, mincing on his feet like a soubrette, moved briskly
away; and the corporal, tossing the wreck of his onion from him, blew
a single note on his whistle. The thin squeal of it was barely
audible thirty yards away, yet it seemed to Jovannic as though the
brief jet of sound had screamed the afternoon stillness to rags. The
two slack-bodied soldiers were suddenly swift and violent; drawn
bayonet in hand, they plunged together into the black of the door and
vanished within. Down the long street the old man let the donkey
wander on and turned, bludgeon in hand, to stare; the child and girl
with the buckets were running, and every door and window showed
startled heads. From within the cottage came uproar screams,
stamping, and the crash of furniture overset.

"You see?" There was for an instant a school-masterly touch in
Captain Hahn. "You see? They've got him; not a hitch anywhere.
Organization, method, foresight; I tell you."

From the dark door there spouted forth a tangle of folk to the hot
dust of the road that rose like smoke under their shifting feet. The
soldiers had the fighting, plunging prisoner; between their bodies,
and past those of the men and women who had run out with them, his
young, black-avised face surged and raged in an agony of resistance,
lifting itself in a maniac effort to be free, then dragged and beaten
down. An old woman tottered on the fringes of the struggle, crying
feebly; others, young and old, wept or screamed; a soldier, bitten in
the hand, cried an oath and gave way. The prisoner tore himself all
but loose.

"Verfluchter Schweinhund!" roared Captain Halm suddenly. He had stood
till then intent, steeped in the interest of the thing, but aloof as
an engineer might watch the action of his machine till the moment at
which it fails. Suddenly, a dangerous compact figure of energy, he
dashed across the road, shouting. "You'd resist arrest, would you?"
he was vociferating. His bamboo cane, thick as a stout thumb, rose
and fell twice smashingly; Jovannic saw the second blow go home upon
the hair above the prisoner's forehead. The man was down in an
instant, and the soldiers were over him and upon him. Captain Hahn,
cane in hand, stood like a victorious duelist.

The old woman the prisoner's mother, possibly, had staggered back at
the thrash of the stick, and now, one hand against the wall of the
house and one to her bosom, she uttered a thin, moaning wail. At that
voice of pain Jovannic started; it was then that he realized that the
other voices, those that had screamed and those that had cursed, had
ceased; even the prisoner, dragged to his feet and held, made no
sound. For an instant the disorder of his mind made it appear that
the sun-drowned silence had never really been broken, that all that
had happened had been no more than a flash of nightmare. Then he
perceived.

Captain Hahn, legs astraddle, a-bulge with the sense of achievement,
was giving orders.

"Tie the dog's hands," he commanded. "Tie them behind his back! Cord?
Get a cord somewhere, you fool! Teach the hound to resist, I will!
Hurry now!"

The prisoner's face was clear to see, no longer writhen and crazy.
For all the great bruise that darkened his brow, it was composed to a
calm as strange as the calm of death. He looked directly at Captain
Hahn, seeming to listen and understand; and when that man of wrath
ceased to speak, his rather sullen young face, heavy-browed,
thick-mouthed, relaxed from its quiet. He smiled!

Beyond him, against the yellow front of the cottage, an old man,
bareheaded, with a fleshless skull's face, had passed his arm under
that of the old woman and was supporting her. The lieutenant saw that
bony mask, too, break into a smile. He looked at the others, the
barefoot girls and the women; whatever the understanding was, they
shared it; each oval, sun-tinged face, under its crown of jet hair,
had the same faint light of laughter of tragic, inscrutable mirth, at
once contemptuous and pitiful. Along the street, folk had come forth
from their doors and stood watching in silence.

"That's right, Corporal; tie him up," came Captain Harm's thickish
voice, rich and fruity with the assurance of power. "He won't desert
again when I've done with him and he won't resist either."

It was not for him to see, in those smiles, that the helpless man,
bound for the flogging-posts of the "Dolina of Weeping," where so
many martyrs to that goddess which is Italy had expiated in torment
their crimes of loyalty and courage, had already found a refuge
beyond the reach of his spies and torturers that he opposed even now
to bonds and blows a resistance that no armed force could overcome.
If he saw the smiles at all, he took them for a tribute to his brisk,
decisive action with the cane.

"And now, take him along," he commanded, when the prisoner's wrists
were tied behind him to his satisfaction. "And stand no nonsense! If
he won't walk make him!"

The corporal saluted. "Zu Befehl, Herr Hauptmann," he deferred, and
the prisoner was thrust down the bank. The old mother, her head
averted, moaned softly. The old man, upholding her, smiled yet his
death's-head smile.

The tiger-yellow of the grass between the trees was paler, the black
was blacker, as the two officers returned across the fields; to the
hush of afternoon had succeeded the briskness of evening. Birds were
awake and a breeze rustled in the branches; and Captain Hahn was
strongly moved to speech.

"System," he said explosively. "All war all life comes down to
system. You get your civil labor by system; you keep it by system.
Now, that little arrest."

It was as maddening as the noise of a mouse in a wainscot. Jovannic
wanted not so much to think as to dwell in the presence of his
impressions. Those strange, quiet smiles!

"Did you see them laughing?" he interrupted. "Smiling, I should say.
After you had cut the fellow down they stopped crying out and they
smiled."

"Ha! Enough to make 'em," said Captain Hahn. "I laughed myself. All
that play-acting before his people, and then, with two smacks kaput!
Fellow looked like a fool! It's part of the system, you see."

"That was it, you think?" The explanation explained nothing to
Jovannic, least of all his own sensations when the sudden surrender
and the sad, pitying mirth had succeeded to the struggle and the
violence. He let Captain Hahn preach his German gospel of system on
earth and organization to man, and walked beside him in silence, with
pensive eyes fixed ahead, where the prisoner and his escort moved in
a plodding black group.

He had not that gift of seeing life and its agents in the barren
white light of his own purposes which so simplified things for
Captain Hahn. He was a son of that mesalliance of nations which was
Austria-Hungary Slavs, their slipping grasp clutching at eternity,
Transylvanians, with pervert Latin ardors troubling their blood, had
blended themselves in him; and he was young. Life for him was a depth
not a surface, as for Captain Hahn; facts were but the skeleton of
truth; glamour clad them and made them vital. He had been transferred
to the Italian front from Russia, where his unripe battalion had lain
in reserve throughout his service; his experiences of the rush over
the Isonzo, of the Italian debacle and the occupation of the province
of Friuli, lay undigested on his mental stomach. It was as though by
a single violent gesture he had translated himself from the quiet
life in his regiment, which had become normal and familiar, to the
hush and mystery of the vast Italian plain, where the crops grew
lavishly as weeds and the trees shut out the distances.

The great villa, whither they were bound, had a juncture of antique
wall, pierced with grilles of beaten iron; its gate, a delicacy of
filigree, let them through to the ordered beauty of the lawns, over
which the mansion presided, a pale, fine presence of a house. Hedges
of yew, like walls of ebony, bounded the principal walks. The
prisoner and the retinue of soldiers that dignified him went ahead;
the two officers, acknowledging the crash of arms of the sentry's
salute at the gate, followed. The improvised prison was in the long
wing of the building that housed the stables. They took the crackling
pebble path that led to it.

"Nu!" Captain Hahn slacked his military gait at one of the formal
openings in the wall of yews that shut them from the lawns before the
great housed serene white front. "The women see?"

But Jovannic had already seen the pair, arms joined, who paced upon
the side-lawn near at hand and had now stopped to look towards them.
It was the old Contessa, who owned the house and still occupied a
part of it, and the Contessina, her daughter. He knew the former as a
disconcerting and never disconcerted specter of an aged lady, with
lips that trembled and eyes that never faltered, and the latter as a
serious, silent, tall girl with the black hair and oval Madonna face
of her country and he knew her, too, as a vague and aching
disturbance in his mind, a presence that troubled his leisure.

"You make your war here as sadly as a funeral," said Captain Hahn. "A
fresh and joyous war--that's what it ought to be! Now, in Flanders,
we'd have had that girl in with us at the mess." He laughed his rich,
throaty laugh that seemed to lay a smear of himself over the subject
of his mirth. "That at the very least!" he added.

Jovannic could only babble protestingly. "She she" he began in a
flustered indignation. Captain Hahn laughed again. He had the
advantage of the single mind over the mind divided against itself.

At the stables the sergeant of the guard received the prisoner. The
redness of the sunset that dyed the world was over and about the
scene. The sergeant, turning out upon the summons of the sentry,
showed himself as an old Hungarian of the regular army, hairy as a
Skye terrier, with the jovial blackguard air of his kind. He turned
slow, estimating eyes on the bound prisoner.

"What is it?" he inquired.

"Deserter that's what it is," replied Captain Hahn sharply; he found
the Austrian soldiers insufficiently respectful. "Lock him up safely,
you understand. He'll go before the military tribunal to-morrow.
Jovannic, just see to signing the papers and all that, will you?"

"At your orders, Herr Hauptmann," deferred Jovannic formally.

"Right," said Captain Hahn. "See you later, then." He swung off
towards the front of the great mansion. Jovannic turned to his
business of consigning the prisoner to safe keeping.

"You can untie his hands now," he said to the men of the escort as
the sergeant moved away to fetch the committal book. The sergeant
turned at his words.

"Plenty of time for that," he said in his hoarse and too familiar
tones. "It's me that's responsible for him, isn't it? Well, then, let
them stay tied up till I've had a look at him. I know these fellows I
do."

"He can't get away from here," began Jovannic impatiently; but the
old sergeant lifted a vast gnarled hand and wagged it at him with a
kind of elderly rebuke.

"They're getting away in dozens every day," he rumbled. He put his
hands on the silent man and turned him where he stood to face the
light. "Yes," he said; "you've been knocking him about, too!"

The man had spoken no word; he showed now to the flush of the evening
a face young and strongly molded, from which all passion, all force,
seemed to have been drawn in and absorbed. It was calm as the face of
a sleeper is calm; only the mark of Captain Hahn's blow, the great
swollen bruise on the brow, touched it with a memory of violence. His
eyes traveled beyond Jovannic and paused, looking. Upon the pebble
path beside the screen of yews a foot sounded; Jovannic turned.

It was the Contessina; she came hurrying towards them. Jovannic
saluted. Only two or three times had he stood as close to her as
then; and never before had he seen her swift in movement, or anything
but grave and measured in gait, gesture and speech. He stared in
surprise at her tall slenderness as it stood in relief against the
rose and bronze of the west.

"It is" she was a little breathless. "It is yes! young Luigi!" The
prisoner, silent till then, stirred and made some little noise of
acquiescence. Behind him, still holding to the cord that bound his
wrists, his two stolid guards stared uncomprehendingly; the old
sergeant, his face one wrinkled mass of bland knowingness, stood with
his thumbs in his belt and his short, fat legs astraddle. She leaned
forward she seemed to sway like a wind-blown stalk and stared at the
prisoner's quiet face. Jovannic saw her lips part in a movement of
pain. Then her face came round to him.

"You, oh!" she gasped at him. "You haven't, you didn't strike him?"

Jovannic stared at her. He understood nothing. Granted that she knew
the man, as no doubt she knew every peasant of the village, he still
didn't understand the touch of agony in her manner and her voice.

"No, signorina," he answered stiffly. "I have not touched him. In
fact, I was ordering him to be unbound."

But Her eyes traveled again to the prisoner's bruised and defaced
brow; she was breathing quickly, like a runner. "Who, then? Who has?"

The old sergeant wagged his disreputable head. "German handwriting,
that is, my young lady," he croaked. "That's how our German lords and
masters curse them! write their Gott mit uns! The noble Captain Hahn
I knew as soon as I saw it!"

"Shut up, you!" ordered Jovannic, with the parade-snarl in his voice.
"And now, untie that man!"

He flung out a peremptory hand; in the girl's presence he meant to
have an end of the sergeant's easy manners. But now it was she who
astonished him by intervening.

"No!" she cried. "No!"

She moved a swift step nearer to the bound man, her arms half
outspread as though she would guard him from them; her face, with its
luminous, soft pallor, was suddenly desperate and strange.

"No!" she cried again. "You mustn't, you mustn't untie him now! You,
you don't know. Oh, wait while I speak to him! Luigi!" She turned to
the prisoner and began to speak with a quick, low urgency; her face,
importunate and fearful, was close to the still mask of his. "Luigi,
promise me! If I let them, if they untie your hands, will you promise
not to, not to do it? Luigi will you?"

Jovannic could only stare at them, bewildered. He heard her pleading
"Will you? Will you promise me, Luigi?" passionately, as though she
would woo him to compliance. The peasant answered nothing; his slow
eyes rested with a sort of heavy meditation on the eagerness of her
face. They seemed to be alone in the midst of the soldiers, like men
among statues. Then, beyond them, he caught sight of the old
sergeant, watching with a kind of critical sympathy; he, at any rate,
understood it all.

But Jovannic began in uncertain protest. None heeded him. The
prisoner sighed and moved a shoulder in a half-shrug as of
deprecation. "No, signorina," he said at last.

"Oh!" The sound was like a wail. The girl swayed back from him.

The sergeant clapped the man on the shoulder. "Be a good lad now!" he
said. "Promise the young lady you'll behave and we'll have the cords
off as quick as we can cut them. Promise her, such a nice young lady
and all!"

The prisoner shook his head wearily. The girl, watching him,
shivered.

"All this" Jovannic roused himself. "I don't understand. What's going
on here? Sergeant, what's it all about?"

The old man made a grimace. "She knows," he said, with a nod towards
the girl. "That proves it's spreading. It's got so now that if you
only clout one of 'em on the side of the head he'll go out and kill
himself. Won't let you so much as touch 'em!"

"What!" Jovannic gaped at him. "Kill themselves? You mean if his
hands are untied, that man will?"

"Him?" The sergeant snorted. "Tonight if he can; tomorrow if he
can't. He's dead, he is. I know 'em, Herr Leutnant. Dozens of 'em
already, for a flogging or even for a kick; they call it 'escaping by
the back door.' And now she knows. It's spreading, I tell you."

"Good Lord!" said Jovannic slowly. But suddenly, in a blaze of
revelation, he understood what had lurked in his mind since the scene
in the village; the smiles that mirth of men who triumph by a
stratagem, who see their adversary vainglorious, strong and doomed.
He remembered Captain Hahn's choleric pomp, his own dignity and
aloofness; and it was with a heat of embarrassment that he now
perceived how he must appear to the prisoner.

It did not occur to him to doubt the sergeant; for the truth sprang
at him.

"You, you knew this, signorina?"

The girl had moved half a dozen paces to where the shadow of the
great yews was deepening on the path. There she lingered, a slender
presence, the oval of her face shining pale in the shade.

He heard her sigh. "Yes," she answered; "I knew."

Jovannic hesitated; then, gathering himself, he turned to the
sergeant. "Now, I'm going to have that man's hands untied," he said.
The brisk speech relieved him like an oath in anger. "No!" as the
sergeant began to rumble "If you answer me when I give you an order
I'll put you in irons. He's to be untied and fed; and if anything
happens to him, if you don't deliver him alive in the morning, I'll
send you before the tribunal and I'll ask to have you shot. You
understand that?"

The old sergeant dropped his hands; he saw that he had to deal with
an officer who, for the moment, meant what he said, and he was old in
wisdom. He dragged himself to a parody of "attention."

"I understand, Herr Leutnant," he growled. But the habit of years was
too strong for him, and he slacked his posture. "It means watching
him all night; the men'll get no sleep."

"You can watch yourself, for all I care," snapped Jovannic. "Now
bring me the book."

The signing and so forth were completed; the prisoner, unbound, stood
between two watchful guards, who attitudinised as though ready to
pounce and grapple him upon the least movement. "Now," commanded
Jovannic, "take him in and feed him. And for the rest you have your
orders."

"March him in," directed the sergeant to the men. The prisoner turned
obediently between them and passed towards the open door of the
guardhouse. He did not look round, and his passivity, his quiescence,
suggested to Jovannic, in a thrill of strange vision, that the world,
action, life had ceased for him at the moment when Captain Harm's
blow fell on his brow.

He was passing in at the door, a guard at either elbow, when the girl
spoke in the shadow.

"Arrivederci, Luigi," she called. "Till we meet again, Luigi."

From the doorway came the prisoner's reply: "Addio, adieu,
signorina!" Then the guardhouse received him.

Jovannic turned. The girl was walking away already, going slowly in
the direction of the wing of the great house that was left to her and
her mother. He joined her, and they came together from the night of
the yew-walk to where, upon the open lawn, the air was still aflood
with the last light of the dying sun.

For a while he did not speak; her mood of tragedy enveloped them both
and hushed him. But never before had he had her thus alone; even to
share her silence was a sort of intimacy, and he groped for more.

"It it is really true, signorina what the sergeant said?" he asked at
length.

She raised her face but did not look towards him. Her profile was a
cameo upon the dusk. "It is true," she answered in a low voice.

"I don't know what to do," said Jovannic. "But you know, signorina,
it was not I that struck him. I had nothing to do with it. I, I hope
you believe that."

Still she gazed straight ahead of her. "I know who struck him," she
said in the same low, level voice.

"Well, then isn't there anything one could do?" pressed Jovannic. "To
stop him from killing himself, I mean. You see, he can't be tied or
watched continually. You know these people. If you could suggest
something, signorina, I'd do what I could."

She seemed to consider. Then "No," she answered; "nothing can be
done." She paused, and he was about to speak when she added: "I was
wrong to try to persuade him."

"Wrong!" exclaimed Jovannic. "Why?"

"It is your punishment," she said. "They have doomed you. You made
them slaves but they make you murderers!" She turned to him at last,
with dark eyes wide and a light as of exaltation in her face. Her
voice, the strong, restrained contralto of the south, broke once as
she went on, but steadied again. "You must not strike an Italian; it
is dangerous. It is more than death, it is damnation! A blow and they
will strike back at your soul and your salvation, and you cannot
escape! Oh, this people and I would have persuaded him to live!"

She shrugged and turned to go on. They had reached the end of the
wing in which she lived. The path went round it, and beyond was the
little irrigation canal one of those small artificial water courses,
deep and full-volumed, which carry the snow water of the Cadore to
the farms of the plain. The dregs of the sunset yet faintly stained
its surface like the lees of wine in water.

"Signorina," began Jovannic. He was not sure f what he wished to say
to her. She paused in her slow walk to hear him. "Signorina," he
began again, "after all, in war, a blow, you know, and I have never
struck one of them never! I don't want you to think of me as, as just
a brute."

"No," she said. "And it is because you ordered Luigi to be untied
that I have warned you of your danger."

"Oh!" Jovannic sighed. "I don't think I really understand yet; but
you have managed to make it all." He made a vague gesture towards the
village and the tree-thronged land. "Well, gruesome! Every man in the
place, apparently."

"And every woman," she put in quickly. "Never forget, Signor Tenente,
it was the women who began it."

"The women began it?"

"Yes," she answered. "The women! You hadn't heard no, it was before
you came of the girl here, in this house of my mother's, who was
among the first? No? Listen, Signor Tenente."

"Yes," he said. It was in his mind that he was about to hear the
stalest story of all, but it was strange that he should hear it from
her.

"I am proud to tell it," she said, as though she answered his
thought. "Proud! A little Friulana of these parts, a housemaid, we
had masses for her till you took our priest away. One of your
officers used to, to persecute her. Oh!" she cried, "why am I afraid
even to name what she had to endure? He was always trying to get into
her bedroom; you understand? And one day he caught hold of her so
that she had to tear herself loose from him. She got free and stood
there and smiled at him. She knew what she had to do then."

"I know, I know," half whispered Jovannic. "In the village today I
saw them smile."

"He did not catch hold of her again; he misread that smile, and said
that he would come that night. 'What hour?' she asked, and he
answered that he would come at midnight. She put her hand to her
bosom and drew out the little crucifix they wear on a string. 'Swear
on this that you will come to me at midnight,' she said, and he took
it in his hand and swore. Then it was evening she came out here, to
where the canal runs under the road. And there she drowned herself."

She paused. "Duilia, her name was," she added quietly.

"Eh?" said Jovannic.

"Duilia, the same as mine."

"But--the officer?" asked Jovannic. "Was he--did he?"

"No," she said. "He did not keep the oath which he swore upon the
crucifix."

From the terrace before the house came the blare of the bugle
sounding the officers' mess call. She turned to go to her door.

"But, signorina!" Jovannic moved towards her. The sense of her, of
the promise and power of her beauty and womanhood, burned in him. And
to the allurement of her youth and her slender grace were added a
glamour of strangeness and the quality of the moment. She paused and
faced him once more.

"It is good night, Signor Tenente," she said.

He watched her pass round the end of the building, unhurried, sad and
unafraid. He stood for some seconds yet after she had disappeared;
then, drawing a deep breath, like one relaxing from a strain, he
turned and walked back to the front of the house.

The burden of the evening lay upon him through the night at mess,
where the grey-clad German and Austrian officers ate and drank below
the mild faces of Pordenone's frescoed saints, and afterwards in his
room, where he dozed and woke and dozed again through the hot,
airless hours. The memory of the girl, the impression of her
attitude, of her pale, unsmiling face, of her low, strong voice,
tormented him; he felt himself alone with her in a hag-ridden land
where all men were murderers or murdered; and she would have none of
him. He arose sour and unrefreshed.

In the great dining-room the splendor of the morning was tainted with
the staleness of last night's cigars, and, for a further flavor,
sitting alone at the table, with his cap on his head and his cane on
the tablecloth beside him, was Captain Hahn. The mess waiter, lurking
near the door, looked scared and worried. He had slept but little.

"Good morning, Herr Hauptmann," said Jovannic, clicking his heels.

Captain Hahn gave him a furious glance and grunted inarticulately. He
made the effect as he sat of emitting fumes, vapors of an overcharged
personality; his naturally violent face was clenched like a fist.

"Here, you dog!" he exploded. The mess waiter all but leaped into the
air. "Get me another glass of brandy." The man dived through the
door. "And now you, Jovannic!"

"At your orders, Herr Hauptmann?" Jovannic looked up in astonishment.
The other's face was blazing at him across the table.

"Who," Captain Hahn seemed to have a difficulty in compressing his
feelings into words, "who ordered you to untie that prisoner?"

"No one," replied Jovannic. His gaze at the convulsed face opposite
him narrowed. He put a hand on the table as though to spring up from
his seat. "Is he dead, then?" he demanded.

"Damn it; so you knew he'd do it!" roared the captain. "Don't deny
it; you've admitted it. You knew he'd hang himself, and yet."

"But he couldn't," cried Jovannic, as Captain Hahn choked
and sputtered. "I ordered him to be watched. I told the
sergeant"--Captain Hahn broke in with something like a howl. "I
wasn't going to have soldiers kept out of their beds for stuff like
that rotten, sentimental Austrian nonsense! I sent 'em off to get
their sleep; but you, you knew, you."

"Ah!" said Jovannic. "Then the Herr Hauptmann cancelled my
arrangements for the prisoner's safety and substituted his own! I am
glad I am not responsible. So he hanged himself?"

Captain Hahn opened his mouth and bit at the air. His hand was on his
heavy cane. The creeping mess waiter, tray in hand, came quivering to
his elbow; never in his service time or his life was he more welcome
to a German officer. The captain grabbed the glass and drank. Then
with a sweep of his right arm he slashed the man with his cane.

"You slow-footed hound!" he bellowed.

Jovannic looked at him curiously. He had not doubted that what the
girl had told him was true; but many things can be true in the
stillness and tangled shadows of the evening that are false in the
light of the morning. This, then, was a murderer, whom a whole
population, a whole country, believed no, knew to be damned to all
eternity this incontinent, stagnant-souled, kept creature of the
army! Not even eternal damnation could dignify him or make him seem
aught but the absurd and noxious thing that he was; a soul like his
would make itself at home in hell like the old sergeant in the
conquered province.

Later in the forenoon he saw the body; and that, too, he felt, failed
to rise to the quality of its fate. Beyond the orchard of old
derelict fruit trees behind the stable two men dug a grave in the
sun, while from the shade the old sergeant smoked and watched them;
and a little apart lay a stretcher, a tattered and stained blanket
outlining the shape upon it. Jovannic was aware of the old man's
shrewd eye measuring him and his temper as he stopped by the
stretcher.

China-bowled pipe in hand, the sergeant lumbered towards him. "You
see, he did it," he said. "Did it at once and got it over. Just
hitched his belt to the window-bars and swung himself off. You can't
stop 'em nowadays."

"Take the blanket off," ordered Jovannic.

The manner of the man's death had distorted the face that lay in the
trough of the stretcher, but it was pitiful and ugly rather than
terrible or horrifying. The body, its inertness, the still sprawl of
the limbs, were puppet-like, with none of death's pomp and menace.
Jovannic stood gazing; the sergeant, with the blanket over his arm,
stood by smoking.

"Hey!" cried the sergeant suddenly, and flapped loose the blanket,
letting it fall to cover the body again. "See, Herr Leutnant the
young lady!"

"Eh?" Jovannic started and turned to look. She was yet a hundred
yards off, coming through the wind-wrenched old trees of the orchard
towards them. In her hand and lying along the curve of her arm she
bore what seemed to be the green bough of a tree. The grass was to
her knees, so that she appeared to float towards them rather than to
walk, and, for the lieutenant, her approach seemed suddenly to lift
all that in the affair was mean or little to the very altitude of
tragedy.

He stood away from the body and raised his hand to his cap peak in
silence. Very slowly she lowered her head in acknowledgment. At the
foot of the stretcher she paused, with bowed head, and stood awhile
so; if she prayed, it was with lips that did not move. In the grave
the diggers ceased to work, and stood, sunk to their waists, to
watch. The great open space was of a sudden reverend and solemn. Then
she knelt, and, taking in both hands the bough of laurel which she
carried, she bent above the covered shape and laid it upon the
blanket.

She rose. It seemed to Jovannic that for an instant she looked him in
the face with eyes that questioned; but she did not speak. Turning,
she went from them by the way she had come, receding through the
fantastic trees between whose leaves the sunlight fell on her in
drops like rain.

There was much for Jovannic to do in the days that followed, for
Captain Harm's dragnet was out over the villages and every day had
its tale of arrests. Jovannic, as one of his assistants, was out
early and late, on horseback or motoring, till the daily scenes of
violence and pain palled on him like a routine. Once, in the village
near headquarters, he saw the Contessina; she was entering the house
whence the prisoner had been dragged forth, but though he loitered in
the neighborhood for an hour she did not come forth. And twice he saw
her walking by the canal with the old Contessa; always he marked in
her that same supple poise of body, that steady, level carriage of
the head. But it was not for a couple of weeks that chance served to
give him any speech with her.

And then, as before, it was evening. He had been out on the affairs
of Captain Hahn, and was returning on foot along a path through the
maize fields. The ripe crops made a wall to either hand, bronze red
and man-high, gleaming like burnished metal in the shine of the
sunset; and here, at a turning in the way, he met her face to face.

"Good evening, signorina," he said, stopping.

"Good evening, Signor Tenente," she answered, and would have passed
on but that he barred the way as he stood.

There was no fear, no doubt, in the quiet of her face as she stood
before him. Her eyes were great and dark, but untroubled, and upon
the lips, where he had never seen a smile, was no tremor.

"Signorina!" he burst forth. "I, I have wanted to speak to you ever
since that evening. I cannot bear that you should think of me as you
do."

"I do not think of you," she answered, with the resonance of
bell-music thrilling through the low tones of her voice.

He took a step nearer to her; she did not shrink nor fall back.

"But," he said, "I think of you always!" Her face did not change; its
even quiet was a challenge and an exasperation. "Signorina, what can
I do? This accursed war if it were not for that you would let me
speak and at least you would listen. But now."

He broke off with a gesture of helpless anger. She did not alter the
grave character of her regard.

"What is it that you wish to say to me?" she asked. "You see that I
am listening."

Her very calm, the slender erectness of her body, her fearless and
serious gaze, were a goad to him.

"Listening!" he cried. He choked down an impulse to be noisy. "Well
then, listen! Signorina signorina, I, I am not one of those. That man
who hanged himself, I would have prevented him and saved him. You
heard me give the orders that he was to be watched and fed; fed,
signorina! It was another who took the guards away and left him to
himself."

"That," she said, "I knew."

"Ah!" He came yet closer. "You knew. Then."

He tried to take her hand. The impulse to touch her was irresistible;
it was a famine in his being. Without stepping back, without, a
movement of retreat or a change of countenance, she put her hands
behind her back.

"Signorina!" He was close to her now; the heat of his face beat upon
the ice of hers. "Oh! This I can't! Give me at least your hand.
Signorina."

Her voice was as level, as calm, as quiet, and yet as loud with
allurement as ever.

"Signor Tenente, no!"

His was the pervert blood, the virtues and the sins born of the
promiscuity of races. Hers rigid, empty of invitation were the ripe
Italian lips, pure, with the fastidious purity of her high birth and
the childlike sweetness of her youth.

"Signorina!" He had meant to plead, but the force of her presence
overwhelmed him. He felt himself sucked down in a whirlpool of
impulse; doom was ahead; but the current of desire was too strong. A
movement and his arms were about her!

"Love!" he gasped. His lips were upon hers, Kissing, kissing! He
slaked himself on that dead and unresponsive mouth violently; he felt
her frail and slender in the crush of his arms. All her virginal and
girlish loveliness was his for a mad moment; then--. He released her.
They stood apart. He passed a hand over his brow to clear the fog
from his eyes.

"I, I" he stammered. He could see her now. She stood opposite him
still, her back to the tall wall of maize that bounded the path. Her
Hand was to her bosom; she breathed hard, and presently, while he
stared, words misshaping themselves upon his abashed lips she smiled!
Her sad, ripe mouth relaxed; all her grave face softened; pity the
profound pity of a martyr who prays for "those who know not what they
do" was alight in her face; the terrible mild mirth of those who are
assured of victory these showed themselves like an ensign. She
smiled!

He saw that smile, and at first vision he did not know it.
"Signorina," he began again hopefully; then he stopped short. He saw
again what he had seen in the village when Captain Hahn had struck
his memorable, self-revealing blow. The smile the smile of those who
choose death for the better part.

"Signorina!" His hands before his eyes hid her and her smile from
him. "Please I beg--." There was no answer. He lowered his hands, and
lifted timidly, repentantly, his face to seek pardon. But upon the
path was no one. She had parted the stout stalks of maize and
disappeared.

"God!" said Jovannic.

An energy possessed him. He charged along the narrow path between the
high palisades of the metal-hued maize. Upon the next corner he
encountered Captain Hahn, swollen and pompous and perfect.

"Well?" said Captain Hahn, exhaling his words as a pricked bladder
exhales air. "Well, you searched those villages, did you?"

Jovannic saluted mechanically. Life his own life clogged his feet; to
act was like wading in treacle. He had an impulse of utter wild
rebellion, of ferocious self-assertion. Then:

"Zu Befehl, Herr Hauptmann!" he said, and saluted.



II

THE DAGO

Eight bells had sounded, and in the little triangular fo'c'sle of the
Anna Maria the men of the port watch were waiting for their dinner.
The daylight which entered by the open hatch overhead spread a carpet
of light at the foot of the ladder, which slid upon the deck to the
heave and fall of the old barque's blunt bows, and left in shadow the
double row of bunks and the chests on which the men sat. From his
seat nearest the ladder, Bill, the ship's inevitable Cockney, raised
his flat voice in complaint.

"That bloomin' Dago takes 'is time over fetchin' the hash," he said.
"'E wants wakin' up a bit that's wot 'e wants."

Sprawling on the edge of his bunk forward, Dan, the oldest man in the
ship, took his pipe from his lips in the deliberate way in which he
did everything. Short in stature and huge in frame, the mass of him,
even in that half-darkness of the fo'c'sle, showed somehow majestic
and powerful.

"The mate came after 'im about somethin' or other," he said in his
deep, slow tones.

"That's right," said another seaman. "It was about spillin' some tar
on the deck, an' now the Dago's got to stop up this arternoon an'
holystone it clean in his watch below."

"Bloomin' fool," growled the Cockney. But it was the wrong word, and
the others were silent.

A man in trouble with an officer, though he be no seaman and a Dago,
may always count on the sympathy of the fo'c'sle.

"'E ain't fit to paddle a bumboat," the Cockney went on. "Can't go
aloft, can't stand 'is wheel, can't even fetch the hash to time."

"Yes!" Dan shifted slowly, and the younger man stopped short. "You
better slip along to the galley, Bill, an' see about that grub."

The Cockney swore, but rose from his seat. Dan was not to be
disobeyed in the fo'c'sle. But at that moment the hatch above was
darkened.

"'Ere's the Dago," cried Bill. "Where you bin, you bloomin' fool?"

A bare foot came over the combing, feeling vaguely for the steps of
the ladder. Dan sat up and laid by his pipe; two seamen went to
assist in the safe delivery of their dinner.

"Carn't yer never learn to bring the grub down the ladder backwards?"
Bill was demanding of the new-comer. "Want to capsize it all again,
like yer done before?"

"Ah, no!"

The Dago stood in the light of the hatch and answered the Cockney
with a shrug and a timid, conciliatory smile. He was a little swarthy
man, lean and anxious, with quick, apprehensive eyes which flitted
now nervously from one to the other of the big sailors whose comrade
and servant he was. There was upon him none of that character of the
sea which shaped their every gesture and attitude. As the Cockney
snarled at him he moved his hands in deprecating gesticulation; a
touch of the florid appeared in him, of that easy vivacity which is
native to races ripened in the sun.

"Keepin' men waitin' like this," mouthed Bill. "Bloomin' flat-footed,
greasy 'anded."

Dan's deliberate voice struck in strongly. "Ain't you goin' to have
no dinner, Dago?" he demanded. "Come on an' sit down to it, man!"

The Dago made one final shrug at Bill.

"De mate," he said, smiling with raised eyebrows, as though in
pitying reference to that officer's infirmities of temper, "'e call
me. So I cannot go to de galley for fetch de dinner more quick.
Please escuse."

Bill snarled. "Come on with ye," called Dan again.

"Ah, yais!" And now his smile and his start to obey apologized to Dan
for not having come at the first summons.

Dan pushed the "kid" of food towards him. "Dig in," he bade him.
"You've had better grub than this in yer time, but it's all there is.
So go at it."

"Better dan dis!" The Dago paused to answer in the act of helping
himself. "Ah, mooch, mooch better, yais. I tell you." He began to
gesticulate as he talked, trying to make these callous, careless men
see with him the images that his words called up.

"Joost before de hot of de day I sit-a down in a balcao, where it is
shade, yais, an' look at-a de water an' de trees, an' hear de bells,
all slow an' gentle, in de church. An' when it is time dey bring me
de leetle fish like-a de gold, all fresh, an' de leetle bread-cakes,
yais, an' de wine."

"That's the style," approved a seaman. Though they did not cease to
eat, they were all listening.

Tales of food and drink are always sure of a hearing in the fo'c'sle.

"On a table of de black wood, shining, an' a leetle cloth like snow,"
the Dago went on; "an' de black woman dat brings it smiles wiz big
white teeth."

He paused, seeing it all the tropic languor and sweetness of the life
he had conjured up, so remote, so utterly different from the
rough-hewn realities that surrounded him.

"Shove that beef-kid down this way, will yer?" called Bill.

"You wait," answered Dan. He jogged the Dago with his elbow. "Now,
lad," he said, "that's talk enough. Get yer grub."

The Dago, recalled from his visions, smiled and sighed and leaned
forward to take his food. From his seat by the ladder, Bill the
Cockney watched with mean, angry eyes to measure the size of his
helping.

It was at Sourabaya, in Java, that he had been shipped to fill, as
far as he could, the place of a man lost overboard. The port had been
bare of seamen; the choice was between the Dago and nobody; and so
one evening he had come alongside in a sampan and joined the crew of
the Anna Maria. He brought with him as his kit a bundle of broken
clothes and a flat paper parcel containing a single suit of clean
white duck, which he cherished under the straw mattress of his bunk
and never wore. He made no pretence of being a seaman. He could
neither steer nor go aloft, and there fell to him, naturally, all the
work of the ship that was ignominious or unpleasant or merely menial.
It was the Dago, with his shrug and his feeble, complaisant smile,
who scraped the boards of the pigsty and hoisted coal for the cook,
and swept out the fo'c'sle while the other men lay and smoked.

"What made ye ship, anyway?" men would ask him angrily, when some
instance of his incompetence had added to the work of the others. To
this, if they would hear him, he had always an answer. He was a
Portuguese, it seemed, of some little town on the coast of East
Africa, where a land-locked bay drowsed below the windows of the
houses under the day-long sun. When he spoke of it, if no one cut him
short, his voice would sink to a hushed tone and he would seem to be
describing a scene he saw. His jerking, graphic hands would fall
still as he talked of the little streets where no one made a noise,
and the sailors stared curiously at his face with the glamour of
dreams on it.

From a life tuned to that murmur of basking waters a mishap had
dragged him forth. It took the shape of a cruise in a fishing boat,
in which he and three companions "t'ree senhores, t'ree gentilmen"
had run into weather and been blown out to sea, there to be rescued,
after four days of hunger and terror, by a steamship which had
carried them to Aden and put them ashore there penniless. It was here
that his tale grew vague. For something like three years he had
wandered, working on ships and ashore, always hoping that sooner or
later a chance would serve him to return to his home. Twice already
he had got to Mozambique, but that was still nearly a thousand miles
from his goal, and on each occasion his ship had carried him
inexorably back. The Anna Maria was bound for Mozambique, and he had
offered himself, with new hopes for his third attempt.

"D'ye reckon you'll do it this passage?" the seamen used to ask him
over their pipes.

He would shrug and spread his hands. "Ah, who can tell? But some
time, yais."

"An' what did ye say the name o' that place o' yours was?"

He would tell them, speaking, its syllables with soft pleasure in
their mere sound.

"Never heard of it," they always said. "Ships don't go there, Dago."

"Ah, but yais." The Dago had known ships call. "Not often, but
sometimes. There is leetle trade, an' ships come. On de tide,
floating up to anchor, so close you hear de men talkin' on de
fo'c'sle head, and dey hear de people ashore girl singin', perhaps
and smell de trees."

"Do they, though?"

"Yais. Dat night I go out to fish in de boat ah, dat night! a girl
was singin', and her voice it float on de bay all round me. An' I
stand in de boat an' take off my hat" he rose to show them the
gesture "and sing back to her, an' she is quiet to listen in de
darkness."

When dinner was over it fell to the Dago to take the "kids" back to
the galley and sweep down the deck. So he had barely time to smoke
the cigarette he made of shredded ship's tobacco rolled in a strip of
newspaper before he had to go on deck again to holystone the spilled
tar from the planks. Dan gave him advice about using a hard stone and
plenty of sand, to which he listened, smiling, and then he went up
the ladder again, with his rags shivering upon him, to the toil of
the afternoon.

The seamen were already in their bunks, each smoking ruminatively the
pipe that prefaces slumber.

"Queer yarn that feller tells," remarked one of them idly. "How much
of it d'you reckon's true, Dan?"

In the for'ard lower bunk Dan opened drowsy eyes. He was lying on his
back with his hands under his head, and the sleeves of his shirt
rolled back left bare his mighty forearms with their faded
tattooings. His big, beardless face was red, like rusty iron, with
over thirty years of seafaring; it was simple and strong, a
transparent mask of the man's upright and steadfast spirit.

"Eh?" he said, and the other repeated his question. Dan sucked at his
pipe and breathed the smoke forth in a thin blue mist.

"It might be true enough," he answered at length, in his deliberate
bass. "Things like that does happen; you c'n read 'em in newspapers.
Anyhow, true or not, the Dago believes it all."

"Meanin' he's mad?" inquired the other. "Blowed if I didn't think it
once or twice myself."

"He's mad right enough," agreed another seaman comfortably, while
from Bill's bunk came the usual snarl of "bloomin' fool."

Dan turned over on his side and put his pipe away.

"He don't do any harm, anyhow," he said, pulling up his blanket.
"There's worse than him."

"Plenty, poor devil," agreed the first speaker, as he too prepared
for the afternoon's sleep.

On his knees upon the deck aft, shoving his holystone to and fro
laboriously and unhandily along the planks where the accident with
the tar-pot had left its stain, the Dago still broke into little
meaningless smiles. For him, at any rate, the narrow scope between
the stem and stern of the Anna Maria was not the world. He had but to
lift up the eyes of his mind to behold, beyond it and dwarfing it to
triviality, the glamours of a life in which it had no part. Those who
saw him at his dreary penance had their excuse for thinking him mad,
for there were moments when his face glowed like a lover's, his lips
moved in soundless speech, and he had the aspect of a man illuminated
by some sudden and tender joy.

"Now, then, you Dago there," the officer of the watch shouted at him.
"Keep that stone movin', an' none of yer shenanikin'!"

"Yais, sir," answered the Dago, and bowed himself obediently.

It needed the ingenuity of Bill to trouble his tranquility of mind.
The old Anna Maria was far on her passage, and already there were
birds about her, the far-flying scouts of the land, and the color of
the water had changed to a softer and more radiant blue. It was as
though sad Africa made herself comely to invite them to her shores.
Bill had a piece of gear to serve with spun-yarn, and was at work
abreast of the foremast, with the Dago to help him. The rope on which
they worked was stretched between the rail and the mast. Bill had the
serving-mallet, and as he worked it round the rope the Dago passed
the ball of spun-yarn in time with him. The mate was aft,
superintending some work upon the mizzen, and Bill took his job
easily. The Dago, with his little smile to which his lips shaped
themselves unconsciously, passed the ball in silence. The Cockney
eyed him unpleasantly.

"Say, Dago," he said presently, "wot was the name o' that there place
you said you come from?"

"Eh?" The Dago roused from his smiling reverie. "De name? Ah, yais."
He pronounced the name slowly, making its syllables render their
music.

"Yus," said Bill, "I thought that was it."

He went on working, steadily, nonchalantly. The Dago stared at him,
perplexed.

"Why you want to know dat name?" he asked at length.

"Well," said Bill, "you bin talkin' abaht it a lot, and so, d'yer
see, I reckoned I'd find out. An' yesterday I 'ad to go into the
cabin to get at the lazareet 'atch, an' the chart was spread out on
the table."

"De chart?" The Dago was slow to understand. "Ah, yais. Mapa chart.
An' you look at-a 'im, yais?"

"Yus," answered Bill, who, like most men before the mast, had never
seen a chart in his life. "I looked at ev'ry name on it, ev'ry
bloomin' one. A chart o' Africa it was, givin' the whole lot of 'em.
But your place."

"Yais?" cried the Dago. "You see 'im? An' de leetle bay under de
hills? You find it?"

"No," said Bill, "I didn't find it. It wasn't there."

"Wasn't there?" The Dago's smile was gone now; his forehead was
puckered like a child's in bewilderment, and a darker doubt at the
back of his thoughts loomed up in his troubled eyes.

"No," said the Cockney, watching him zestfully. "You got it wrong,
Dago, an' there ain't no such place. You dreamt it. Savvy? All wot
you bin tell in' us about the town an' the bay an' the way you used
to take it easy there all that's just a bloomin' lie. See?"

The Dago's face was white and his lips trembled. He tried to smile.

"Not there," he repeated. "It is de joke, not? You fool me, Bill,
yais?"

Bill shook his head. "I wouldn't fool yer abaht a thing like that,"
he declared sturdily. "There ain't no such place, Dago. It's just one
o' yer fancies, yer know."

In those three years of wandering there had been dark hours turbulent
with pain, hours when his vision, his hope, his memory had not
availed to uplift him, and he had known the terror of a doubt lest
the whole of it should, after all, be but a creation of his
yearnings, a mirage of his desires. Everywhere men had believed him
mad. He had accepted that as he accepted toil, hunger and exile, as
things to be redeemed by their end. But if it should be true! If this
grossness and harshness should, after all, be his real life! Bill saw
the agony that broke loose within his victim, and bent his head above
his work to hide a smile.

"Ah!" The quiet exclamation was all that issued from the Dago's lips;
the surge of emotion within him sought no vent in words. But Bill was
satisfied; he had the instincts of a connoisseur in torment, and the
Dago's face was now a mask that looked as if it had never smiled.

It was Dan that spoiled and undid the afternoon's work. During the
second dog-watch, when the Dago kept the look out, he carried his
pipe to the forecastle head and joined him there. Right ahead of the
ship the evening sky was still stained with the afterglow of the
sunset; the jib-boom swung gently athwart a heaven in whose
darkening arch there was still a ghost of color. Between the anchors,
where they lay lashed on their chocks, the Dago stood and gazed west
to where, beyond the horizon, the shores of Africa had turned barren
and meaningless.

"Well, lad," rumbled Dan, "gettin' near it, eh? Gettin' on towards
the little town by the bay, ain't we?"

The Dago swung round towards him. "Dere is no town," he said calmly.
"No town, no bay, no anyt'ing. I was mad, but now I know."

He spoke evenly enough, and in the lessening light his face was
indistinct. But old Dan, for all his thirty and odd years of hard
living, had an ear tuned delicately to the trouble of his voice.

"What's all' this?" he demanded shortly. "Who's been tellin' you
there ain't no town or anything? Out with it! Who was it?"

"It don't matter," said the Dago. "It was Bill." And briefly, in the
same even tones, like those of a man who talks in his sleep, he told
the tale of Bill's afternoon's sport.

"Ah, so it was Bill!" said Dan slowly, when the recital was at an
end. "Bill, was it? Ye-es. Well, o' course you know that Bill's the
biggest liar ever shipped out o' London, where liars is as common as
weevils in bread. So you don't want to take no notice of anything
Bill says."

The Dago shook his head. "It is not that," he said. "It is not de
first time I 'ave been called mad; and sometimes I have think it
myself."

"Oh, go on with ye," urged Dan. "You ain't mad."

"T'ree years," went on the Dago in his mournful, subdued voice.
"T'ree years I go about an' work, always poor, dirty work, an' got no
name, only 'Dago.' I t'ink all de time 'bout my leetle beautiful
town; but sometimes I t'ink, too, when I am tired an' people is hard
to me: 'It is a dream. De world has no place so good as dat.' What
you t'ink, Dan?"

"Oh, I dunno," grunted Dan awkwardly. "Anyhow, there ain't no harm in
it. It don't follow a man's mad because he's got fancies."

"Fancies!" repeated the Dago. "Fancies!" He seemed to laugh a little
to himself, laughter with no mirth in it.

Night was sinking on the great solitude of waters. Above them the
sails of the foremast stood pale and lofty, and there was the
rhythmic jar of a block against a backstay. The Anna Maria lifted her
weather bow easily to the even sea, and the two men on the fo'c'sle
head swung on their feet unconsciously to the movement of the barque.

"Eef it was only a fancy," said the Dago suddenly, "eef it was only a
town in my mind, I don' want it no more." He made a motion with his
hand as though he cast something from him. "I t'ink all dis time it
is true, dat some day I find it again. It help me; it keep me glad;
it save me from misery. But now it is all finish."

"But don't you know," cried Dan, "don't you know for sure whether
it's true or not?"

The Dago shook his head. "I am no more sure," he said. "For t'ree
years I have had bad times, hard times. So now I am not sure. Dat is
why I t'ink I am a little mad, like Bill said."

"Never mind Bill," said Dan. "I'll settle with Bill."

He put his heavy hand on the other's arm.

"Lad," he said, "I'm sorry for your trouble. I ain't settin' up to
know much about fellers' minds, but it seems to me as if you was
better off without them fancies, if they ain't true. An' that town o'
yours! It sounded fine, as good a place as ever I heard of; but it
was mighty like them ports worn-out sailormen is always figurin' to
themselves, where they'll go ashore and take it easy for the rest o'
their lives. It was too good, mate, too good to be true."

There was a pause. "Yes," said the Dago at last. "It was too good,
Dan."

Dan gave his arm a grip, and left him to his look out over a sea
whose shores were now as desolate as itself, a man henceforth to be
counted sane, since he knew life as bare of beauty, sordid and
difficult.

Dan put his pipe in his pocket and walked aft to the main hatch,
where the men were gathered for the leisure of the dog-watch. He went
at his usual deliberate gait, a notable figure of seamanlike
respectability and efficiency. Upon his big, shaven face a rather
stolid tranquility reigned. Bill, leaning against a corner of the
galley, looked up at him carelessly.

"'Ullo, Dan," he greeted him.

"Hullo, Bill," responded Dan. "I bin talkin' to the Dago."

"Oh, 'ave yer?" said Bill.

"Yes," said Dan, in the same conversational tone. "I have. An' now
I'm goin' to have a word with you. Stand clear of that deckhouse!"

"Eh?" cried Bill. "Say, Dan--"

That was all. Dan's fist, the right one, of the hue and hardness of
teak, with Dan's arm behind it, arrived just under his eye, and the
rest of the conversation was yelps. No one attempted to interrupt;
even the captain and mate, who watched from the poop, made no motion
to interfere; Dan's reputation for uprightness stood him in good
stead.

"There, now," he said, when it was over, and he allowed the gasping,
bleeding Cockney to fall back on the hatch. "See what comes of not
takin' hints?"

They made Mozambique upon the morning of a day when the sun poured
from the heavens and the light wind came warm off the land. The old
Anna Maria, furling sail by sail, floated up to her anchorage and let
go her anchors just as a shore-boat, manned by big nearly naked
negroes, with a white man sitting in the stern, raced up alongside.
In less than an hour the hands were lifting the anchors again and
getting ready to go to sea once more. The cook, who had served the
captain and his visitor with breakfast, was able to explain the
mystery. He stood at his galley door, with his cloth cap cocked
sportively over one eye, and gave the facts to the inquisitive
sailors.

"That feller in the boat was th' agent," he said. "A Porchuguee, he
was. Wanted wine f'r 'is breakfus'. An' the orders is, we're to go
down the coast to a place called le'me see, now. What was it called?
Some Dago name that I can't call to mind."

Dan was among his hearers, and by some freak of memory the name of
the town of which the Dago had been used to speak, the town which was
now a dream to be forgotten, came to his lips. He spoke it aloud.

"It wasn't that, I s'pose?" he suggested.

"You've got it," cried the cook. "That was it, Dan; the very place.
Fancy you knowin' it. Well, we got to go down there and get in across
a sort of bar what's there an' discharge into lighters. Seems it's a
bit out o' the way o' shippin'. The skipper said that the charterers
seemed to think the old boat ran on wheels."

"Queer!" said Dan. To himself he said: "He must ha' heard the name
somewhere and hitched his dream to it."

The name, as it chanced, was one of many syllables, and the sailors
managed them badly. Men who speak of the islands of Diego Ramirez as
the "Daggarammarines" are not likely to deal faithfully with a narrie
that rings delicately like guitar strings, and Dan observed that
their mention of the barque's destination had no effect upon the
Dago. For him all ports had become indifferent; one was not nearer
than another to any place of his desire. He spoke no more of his
town; when the men, trying to draw him, spoke about food, or women,
or other roads to luxury, he answered without smiling.

"I t'ink no more 'bout dat," he said. "T'ree year work an' have bad
times. Before, I don' remember o more."

"He was better when he was crazy," agreed the seamen. It was as
though the gaiety, the spring of gladness, within the little man had
been dried up; there was left only the incompetent and despised Dago.
He faced the routine of his toil now with no smile of preoccupation
for a sweeter vision; he shuffled about decks, futile as ever, with
the dreariness of a man in prison.

Only to Dan he spoke more freely. It was while the watch was washing
down decks in the morning. The two were side by side, plying their
brooms along the wet planks, while about them the dawn broadened
towards the tropic day.

"I am no more mad," said the Dago. "Now I know I am not mad. Dat name
of de place where we go de men don' know how to speak it, but it is
de name of my town, de town I t'ink about once so much. Yais I know!
At last, after all dis time, I come dere, but I am not glad. I am
never glad no more 'bout not'ing."

Dan worked on. He could think of no answer to make.

"Only 'bout one t'ing I am glad," went on the Dago. "'Bout a friend I
make on dis ship; 'bout you, Dan."

"Oh, hell!" grunted Dan awkwardly.

"But 'bout de town, I am no more glad. I know now it is more better
to be sad an' poor an' weak dan to be mad an' glad about fancies.
Yais I know now!"

"You'll be all right," said Dan. "Cheer up, lad. There's fellers
worse off than you!" An inspiration lit up his honest and downright
brain for a moment. "Why," he said, "it's better to be you than be a
feller like Bill that never had a fancy in his life. You've lost a
lot, maybe; but you can't lose a thing you never had."

The Dago half-smiled. "Yais," he said. "You are mos' wise, Dan. But,
Dan! Dan!"

"Yes. What?"

"If it had been true, Dan dat beautiful town an' all my dream! If it
had been true!"

"Shove along wi' that broom," advised Dan. "The mate's lookin'."

They came abreast of their port about midday, and Dan, at the wheel,
heard the captain swear as they stood in through a maze of broken
water, where coral reefs sprouted like weeds in a neglected garden,
towards the hills that stood low above the horizon. He had been
furnished, it seemed, with a chart concerning whose trustworthiness
he entertained the bitterest doubts. There was some discussion with
the mate about anchoring and sending in a boat to bring off a pilot,
but presently they picked up a line of poles sticking up above the
water like a ruined fence, and these seemed to comfort the captain.
Bits of trees swam alongside; a flight of small birds, with flashes
of green and red in their plumage, swung about them; the water, as
they went, changed color. Little by little the hills lifted from the
level of the water and took on color and variety, till from the deck
one could make out the swell of their contours and distinguish the
hues of the wild vegetation that clothed them. The yellow of a beach
and a snowy gleam of surf showed at their feet, and then, dead ahead
and still far away, they opened, and in the gap there was visible the
still shining blue of water that ran inland and lay quiet under their
shelter.

"Stand by your to'gallant halyards!" came the order. "Lower away
there!"

It was evening already when the old Anna Maria, floating slowly under
a couple of jibs and a foretopsail, rounded the point and opened the
town. The bay, with its fringe of palms, lay clear before her; beyond
its farthest edge, the sun had just set, leaving his glories to burn
out behind him, and astern of them in the east the swift tropic night
was racing up the sky. The little town a church-tower and a cluster
of painted, flat-roofed houses, lay behind the point at the water's
edge. There was a music of bells in the still air; all the scene
breathed that joyous languor, that easy beauty which only the sun can
ripen, which the windy north never knows. With the night at her
heels, the old Anna Maria moved almost imperceptibly towards the
town.

"Stand by to anchor!" came the order from aft, and the mate, calling
three men with him, went up the ladder to the fo'c'sle head.

Dan was one of the three. He was at the rail, looking at the little
town as it unfolded itself, house after house, with the narrow
streets between, when he first noticed the white figure at his side.
He turned in surprise; it was the Dago, in the cherished suit of duck
which he had guarded for so long under his mattress. Heretofore, Dan
had known him only in his rags of working-clothes, a mildly pathetic
and ridiculous figure; now he was seemly, unfamiliar, a little
surprising.

"What's all this?" demanded Dan.

The Dago was looking with all his eyes at the town, already growing
dim.

"Dis?" he repeated. "Dese clo'se, I keep dem for my town, Dan. To
come back wis yais! For not be like a mendigo a beggar. Now, no need
to keep dem no more; and dis place oh, Dan, it is so like, so like! I
dream it all yais de church, de praca all of it!"

"Steady!" growled Dan. "Don't get dreamin' it again."

"No," said the Dago; "I never dream no more. Never no more!"

He did not take his eyes from it; he stood at the rail gazing,
intent, absorbed. He did not hear the mate's brief order that
summoned him and the others across the deck.

"When I go out on de fishin' boat," he said aloud, thinking Dan was
still at his side, "a girl was singin' an'--"

"Here, you!" cried the mate. "What's the matter with you? Why don't
you?"

He stopped in amazement, for the Dago turned and spat a brief word at
him, making a gesture with his hand as though to command silence.

In the moment that followed they all heard it a voice that sang, a
strong and sweet contralto that strewed its tones forth like a scent,
to add itself to the other scents of earth and leaves that traveled
across the waters and reached them on their deck. They heard it lift
itself as on wings to a high exaltation of melody and fail thence,
hushing and drooping deliciously, down diminishing slopes of song.

"What the-" began the mate, and moved to cross the deck.

His surprises were not yet at an end, for Dan Dan, the ideal seaman,
the precise in his duty, the dependable, the prosaically perfect Dan
caught him by the arm with a grip in which there was no deference for
the authority of a chief officer.

"Leave him be, sir," urged Dan. "I, I know what's the matter with
him. Leave him be!"

The voice ashore soared again, sure and buoyant; the mate dragged his
arm free from Dan's hold and turned to swear; on the main deck the
horse-laugh of Bill answered the singer. The Dago heard nothing.
Bending forward over the rail, he stretched both arms forth, and in a
voice that none recognized, broken and passionate, he took up the
song. It was but for a minute, while the mate recovered his outraged
senses, but it was enough. The voice ashore had ceased.

"What the blank blank!" roared the mate, as he dragged the Dago
across the deck. "What d'ye mean by it, eh? Get hold o' that rope, or
I'll--."

"Yais, sir."

A moment later he turned to Dan, and in the already deepening gloom
his smile gleamed white in his face.

"Ah, my frien'!" he said. "Dere was no dream. T'ree years, all bad,
all hard, all sad dat was de dream. Now I wake up. Only one t'ing
true in all de t'ree years de friend I make yais."

"Hark!" said Dan. "Hear it? There's boats comin' off to us."

"Yais!" The smile gleamed again. "For me. It is no dream. Dey hear my
voice when I sing. By'm by you hear dem callin', 'Felipe!' Dat's my
name."

"Listen, then," said Dan in a whisper.

The water trickled alongside; they were coming up to their berth. The
bells from the church ashore were still. Across the bay there came
the clack of oars in rowlocks, pulled briskly, and voices.

"Felipe!" they called. "Felipe!"

The Dago's hand found Dan's.



III

WOOD-LADIES

The pine trees of the wood joined their branches into a dome of
intricate groinings over the floor of ferns where the children sat
sunk to the neck in a foam of tender green. The sunbeams that slanted
in made shivering patches of gold about them. Joyce, the elder of the
pair, was trying to explain why she had wished to come here from the
glooms of the lesser wood beyond.

"I wasn't 'zactly frightened," she said. "I knew there wasn't any
lions or robbers, or anything like that. But--"

"Tramps?" suggested Joan.

"No! You know I don't mind tramps, Joan. But as we was going along
under all those dark bushes where it was so quiet, I kept feeling as
if there was something behind me. I looked round and there wasn't
anything, but well, it felt as if there was."

Joyce's small face was knit and intent with the effort to convey her
meaning. She was a slim, erect child, as near seven years of age as
made no matter, with eyes that were going to be grey but had not yet
ceased to be blue. Joan, who was a bare five, a mere huge baby, was
trying to root up a fern that grew between her feet.

"I know," she said, tugging mightily. The fern gave suddenly, and
Joan fell over on her back, with her stout legs sticking up stiffly.
In this posture she continued the conversation undisturbed. "I know,
Joy. It was wood-ladies!"

"Wood-ladies!" Joyce frowned in faint perplexity as Joan rolled right
side up again. Wood-ladies were dim inhabitants of the woods, beings
of the order of fairies and angels and even vaguer, for there was
nothing about them in the story-books. Joyce, who felt that she was
getting on in years, was willing to be skeptical about them, but
could not always manage it. In the nursery, with the hard, clean
linoleum underfoot and the barred window looking out on the lawn and
the road, it was easy; she occasionally shocked Joan, and sometimes
herself, by the license of her speech on such matters; but it was a
different affair when one came to the gate at the end of the garden,
and passed as through a dream portal from the sunshine and frank sky
to the cathedral shadows and great whispering aisles of the wood.
There, the dimness was like the shadow of a presence; as babies they
had been aware of it, and answered their own questions by inventing
wood-ladies to float among the trunks and people the still, green
chambers. Now, neither of them could remember how they had first
learned of wood-ladies.

"Wood-ladies," repeated Joyce, and turned with a little shiver to
look across the ferns to where the pines ended and the lesser wood,
dense with undergrowth, broke at their edge like a wave on a steep
beach. It was there, in a tunnel of a path that writhed beneath
over-arching bushes, that she had been troubled with the sense of
unseen companions. Joan, her fat hands struggling with another fern,
followed her glance.

"That's where they are," she said casually. "They like being in the
dark."

"Joan!" Joyce spoke earnestly. "Say truly truly, mind! do you think
there is wood-ladies at all?"

"'Course there is," replied Joan, cheerfully. "Fairies in fields and
angels in heaven and dragons in caves and wood-ladies in woods."

"But," objected Joyce, "nobody ever sees them."

Joan lifted her round baby face, plump, serene, bright with
innocence, and gazed across at the tangled trees beyond the ferns.
She wore the countenance with which she was wont to win games, and
Joyce thrilled nervously at her certainty. Her eyes, which were
brown, seemed to seek expertly; then she nodded.

"There's one now," she said, and fell to work with her fern again.

Joyce, crouching among the broad green leaves, looked tensely, dread
and curiosity the child's avid curiosity for the supernatural alight
in her face. In the wood a breath of wind stirred the leaves; the
shadows and the fretted lights shifted and swung; all was vague
movement and change. Was it a bough that bent and sprang back or a
flicker of draperies, dim and green, shrouding a tenuous form that
passed like a smoke-wreath? She stared with wide eyes, and it seemed
to her that for an instant she saw the figure turn and the pallor of
a face, with a mist of hair about it, sway towards her. There was an
impression of eyes, large and tender, of an infinite grace and
fragility, of a coloring that merged into the greens and browns of
the wood; and as she drew her breath, it was all no more. The trees,
the lights and shades, the stir of branches were as before, but
something was gone from them.

"Joan!" she cried, hesitating.

"Yes," said Joan, without looking up. "What?"

The sound of words had broken a spell. Joyce was no longer sure that
she had seen anything.

"I thought, just now, I could see something," she said. "But I s'pose
I didn't."

"I did," remarked Joan.

Joyce crawled through the crisp ferns till she was close to Joan,
sitting solid and untroubled and busy upon the ground, with broken
stems and leaves all round her.

"Joan," she begged. "Be nice. You're trying to frighten me, aren't
you?"

"I'm not," protested Joan. "I did see a wood-lady. Wood-ladies
doesn't hurt you; wood-ladies are nice. You're a coward, Joyce."

"I can't help it," said Joyce, sighing. "But I won't go into the dark
spots of the wood any more."

"Coward," repeated Joan absently, but with a certain relish.

"You wouldn't like to go there by yourself!" cried Joyce. "If I
wasn't with you, you'd be a coward, too. You know you would."

She stopped, for Joan had swept her lap free of debris and was rising
to her feet. Joan, for all her plumpness and infantile softness, had
a certain deliberate dignity when she was put upon her mettle. She
eyed her sister with a calm and very galling superiority.

"I'm going there now," she answered; "all by mineself."

"Go, then!" retorted Joyce, angrily.

Without a further word Joan turned her back and began to plough her
way across the ferns towards the dark wood. Joyce, watching her, saw
her go at first with wrath, for she had been stung, and then with
compunction. The plump baby was so small in the brooding solemnity of
the pines, thrusting indefatigably along, buried to the waist in
ferns. Her sleek, brown head had a devoted look; the whole of her
seemed to go with so sturdy an innocence towards those peopled and
uncanny glooms. Joyce rose to her knees to call her back.

"Joan!" she cried. The baby turned. "Joan! Come back; come back an'
be friends!"

Joan, maintaining her offing, replied with a gesture. It was a
gesture they had learned from the boot-and-knife boy, and they had
once been spanked for practicing it on the piano-tuner. The
boot-and-knife boy called it "cocking a snook," and it consisted in
raising a thumb to one's nose and spreading the fingers out. It was
defiance and insult in tabloid form. Then she turned and plodded on.
The opaque wall of the wood was before her and over her, but she knew
its breach. She ducked her head under a droop of branches, squirmed
through, was visible still for some seconds as a gleam of blue frock,
and then the ghostly shadows received her and she was gone. The wood
closed behind her like a lid.

Joyce, squatting in her place, blinked a little breathlessly to shift
from her senses an oppression of alarm, and settled down to wait for
her. At least it was true that nothing ever happened to Joan; even
when she fell into a water-butt she suffered no damage; and the wood
was a place to which they came every day.

"Besides," she considered, enumerating her resources of comfort;
"besides, there can't be such things as wood-ladies, really."

But Joan was a long time gone. The dome of pines took on an uncanny
stillness; the moving patches of sun seemed furtive and unnatural;
the ferns swayed without noise. In the midst of it, patient and
nervous, sat Joyce, watching always that spot in the bushes where a
blue overall and a brown head had disappeared. The under-note of
alarm which stirred her senses died down; a child finds it hard to
spin out a mood; she simply sat, half-dreaming in the peace of the
morning, half-watching the wood. Time slipped by her, and presently
there came Mother, smiling and seeking through the trees for her
babies.

"Isn't there a clock inside you that tells you when it's lunch time?"
asked Mother. "You're ever so late. Where's Joan?"

Joyce rose among the ferns, delicate and elfin, with a shy perplexity
on her face. It was difficult to speak even to Mother about
wood-ladies without a pretence of skepticism.

"I forgot about lunch," she said, taking the slim, cool hand which
Mother held out to her. "Joan's in there." She nodded at the bushes.

"Is she?" said Mother, and called aloud in her singing voice that was
so clear to hear in the spaces of the wood. "Joan! Joan!"

A cheeky bird answered with a whistle, and Mother called again.

"She said," explained Joyce; "she said she saw a wood-lady, and then
she went in there to show me she wasn't afraid."

"What's a wood-lady, chick?" asked Mother. "The rascal!" she said,
smiling, when Joyce had explained as best she could. "We'll have to
go and look for her."

They went hand in hand, and Mother showed herself clever in parting a
path among the bushes. She managed so that no bough sprang back to
strike Joyce, and without tearing or soiling her own soft, white
dress; one could guess that when she had been a little girl she, too,
had had a wood to play in. They cut down by the Secret Pond, where
the old rhododendrons were, and out to the edge of the fields; and
when they paused Mother would lift her head and call again, and her
voice rang in the wood like a bell. By the pond, which was a black
water with steep banks, she paused and showed a serious face; but
there were no marks of shoes on its clay slopes, and she shook her
head and went on. But to all the calling there was no answer, no
distant cheery bellow to guide them to Joan.

"I wish she wouldn't play these tricks," said Mother. "I don't like
them a bit."

"I expect she's hiding," said Joyce. "There aren't wood-ladies
really, are there, Mother?"

"There's nothing worse in these woods than a rather naughty baby,"
Mother replied. "We'll go back by the path and call her again."

Joyce knew that the hand which held hers tightened as they went, and
there was still no answer to Mother's calling. She could not have
told what it was that made her suddenly breathless; the wood about
her turned desolate; an oppression of distress and bewilderment
burdened them both. "Joan! Joan!" called Mother in her strong
beautiful contralto, swelling the word forth in powerful music, and
when she ceased the silence was like a taunt. It was not as if Joan
were there and failed to answer; it was as if there were no longer
any Joan anywhere. They came at last to the space of sparse trees
which bordered their garden.

"We mustn't be silly about this," said Mother, speaking as much to
herself as to Joyce. "Nothing can have happened to her. And you must
have lunch, chick."

"Without waiting for Joan?" asked Joyce.

"Yes. The gardener and the boot-boy must look for Joan," said Mother,
opening the gate.

The dining-room looked very secure and homelike, with its big window
and its cheerful table spread for lunch. Joyce's place faced the
window, so that she could see the lawn and the hedge bounding the
kitchen garden; and when Mother had served her with food, she was
left alone to eat it. Presently the gardener and the boot-boy passed
the window, each carrying a hedge-stake and looking war-like. There
reached her a murmur of voices; the gardener was mumbling something
about tramps.

"Oh, I don't think so," replied Mother's voice.

Mother came in presently and sat down, but did not eat anything.
Joyce asked her why.

"Oh, I shall have some lunch when Joan comes," answered Mother. "I
shan't be hungry till then. Will you have some more, my pet?"

When Joyce had finished, they went out again to the wood to meet Joan
when she was brought back in custody. Mother walked quite slowly,
looking all the time as if she would like to run. Joyce held her hand
and sometimes glanced up at her face, so full of wonder and a sort of
resentful doubt, as though circumstances were playing an unmannerly
trick on her. At the gate they came across the boot-boy.

"I bin all acrost that way," said the boot-boy, pointing with his
stumpy black forefinger, "and then acrost that way, an' Mister Jenks"
Jenks was the gardener "'e've gone about in rings, 'e 'ave. And there
ain't no sign nor token, mum, not a sign there ain't."

From behind him sounded the voice of the gardener, thrashing among
the trees. "Miss Joan!" he roared. "Hi! Miss Jo-an! You're
a-frightin' your Ma proper. Where are ye, then?"

"She must be hiding," said Mother. "You must go on looking, Walter.
You must go on looking till you find her."

"Yes'm," said Walter. "If's she's in there us'll find her, soon or
late."

He ran off, and presently his voice was joined to Jenks's, calling
Joan calling, calling, and getting no answer.

Mother took Joyce's hand again.

"Come," she said. "We'll walk round by the path, and you must tell me
again how it all happened. Did you really see something when Joan
told you to look?"

"I expect I didn't," replied Joyce, dolefully. "But Joan's always
saying there's a fairy or something in the shadows, and I always
think I see them for a moment."

"It couldn't have been a live woman or a man that you saw?"

"Oh, no!" Joyce was positive of that. Mother's hand tightened on hers
understandingly, and they went on in silence till they met Jenks.

Jenks was an oldish man with bushy grey whiskers, who never wore a
coat, and now he was wet to the loins with mud and water.

"That there ol' pond," he explained. "I've been an' took a look at
her. Tromped through her proper, I did, an' I'll go bail there ain't
so much as a dead cat in all the mud of her. Thish yer's a mistry,
mum, an' no mistake."

Mother stared at him. "I can't bear this," she said suddenly. "You
must go on searching, Jenks, and Walter must go on his bicycle to the
police station at once. Call him, please!"

"Walter!" roared Jenks obediently.

"Comin'!" answered the boot-boy, and burst forth from the bushes. In
swift, clear words, which no stupidity could mistake or forget,
Mother gave him his orders, spoken in a tone that meant urgency.
Walter went flying to execute them.

"Oh, Mother, where do you think Joan can be?" begged Joyce when Jenks
had gone off to resume his search:

"I don't know," said Mother. "It's all so absurd."

"If there was wood-ladies, they wouldn't hurt a baby like Joan,"
suggested Joyce.

"Oh, who could hurt her!" cried Mother, and fell to calling again.
Her voice, of which each accent was music, alternated with the harsh
roars of Jenks.

Walter on his bicycle must have hurried, in spite of his permanently
punctured front tire, for it was a very short time before bells rang
in the steep lane from the road and Superintendent Farrow himself
wheeled his machine in at the gate, massive and self-possessed, a
blue-clad minister of comfort. He heard Mother's tale, which embodied
that of Joyce, with a half-smile lurking in his moustache and his big
chin creased back against his collar. Then he nodded, exactly as if
he saw through the whole business and could find Joan in a minute or
two, and propped his bicycle against the fence.

"I understand, then," he said, "that the little girl's been missing
for rather more than an hour. In that case, she can't have got far. I
sent a couple o' constables round the roads be'ind the wood before I
started, an' now I'll just 'ave a look through the wood myself."

"Thank you," said Mother. "I don't know why I'm so nervous, but--."

"Very natural, ma'am," said the big superintendent, comfortingly, and
went with them to the wood.

It was rather thrilling to go with him and watch him. Joyce and
Mother had to show him the place from which Joan had started and the
spot at which she had disappeared. He looked at them hard, frowning a
little and nodding to himself, and went stalking mightily among the
ferns. "It was 'ere she went?" he inquired, as he reached the dark
path, and being assured that it was, he thrust in and commenced his
search. The pond seemed to give him ideas, which old Jenks disposed
of, and he marched on till he came out to the edge of the fields,
where the hay was yet uncut. Joan could not have crossed them without
leaving a track in the tall grass as clear as a cart-rut.

"We 'ave to consider the possibilities of the matter," said the
superintendent. "Assumin' that the wood 'as been thoroughly searched,
where did she get out of it?"

"Searched!" growled old Jenks. "There ain't a inch as I 'aven't
searched an' seen, not a inch."

"The kidnappin' the'ry," went on the superintendent, ignoring him and
turning to Mother, "I don't incline to. 'Owever, we must go to work
in order, an' I'll 'ave my men up 'ere and make sure of the wood. All
gypsies an' tramps will be stopped and interrogated. I don't think
there's no cause for you to feel anxious, ma'am. I 'ope to 'ave some
news for you in the course of the afternoon."

They watched him free-wheel down the lane and shoot round the corner.

"Oh, dear," said Mother, then: "Why doesn't the baby come? I wish
Daddy weren't away."

Now that the police had entered the affair Joyce felt that there
remained nothing to be done. Uniformed authority was in charge of
events; it could not fail to find Joan. She had a vision of the
police at work, stopping straggling families of tramps on distant
by-roads, looking into the contents of their dreadful bundles,
flashing the official bull's eye lantern into the mysterious interior
of gypsy caravans, and making ragged men and slatternly women give an
account of their wanderings. No limits to which they would not go;
how could they fail? She wished their success seemed as inevitable to
her mother as it did to her.

"They're sure to bring her back, Mother," she repeated.

"Oh, chick," said Mother, "I keep telling myself so. But I wish I
wish."

"What, Mother?"

"I wish," said Mother in a sudden burst of speech, as if she were
confessing something that troubled her; "I wish you hadn't seen that
wood-lady."

The tall young constables and the plump fatherly sergeant annoyed old
Jenks by searching the wood as though he had done nothing. It was a
real search this time. Each of them took a part of the ground and
went over it as though he were looking for a needle which had been
lost, and no fewer than three of them trod every inch of the bottom
of the Secret Pond. They took shovels and opened up an old fox's
earth; and a sad-looking man in shabby plain clothes arrived and
walked about smoking a pipe a detective! Up from the village, too,
came the big young curate and the squire's two sons, civil and
sympathetic and eager to be helpful; they all thought it natural that
Mother should be anxious, but refused to credit for an instant that
anything could have happened to Joyce.

"That baby!" urged the curate. "Why, my dear lady, Joan is better
known hereabouts than King George himself. No one could take her a
mile without having to answer questions. I don't know what's keeping
her, but you may be sure she's all right."

"Course she is," chorused the others, swinging their sticks
lightheartedly. "'Course she's all right."

"Get her for me, then," said Mother. "I don't want to be silly, and
you're awfully good. But I must have her; I must have her. I, I want
her."

The squire's sons turned as if on an order and went towards the wood.
The curate lingered a moment. He was a huge youth, an athlete and a
gentleman, and his hard clean-shaven face could be kind and serious.

"We're sure to get her," he said in lower tones. "And you must help
us with your faith and courage. Can you?"

Mother's hand tightened on that of Joyce.

"We are doing our best," she said, and smiled she smiled. The curate
nodded and went his way to the wood.

A little later in the afternoon came Colonel Warden, the lord and
master of all the police in the county, a gay trim soldier whom the
children knew and liked. With him, in his big automobile, were more
policemen and a pair of queer liver-colored dogs, all baggy skin and
bleary eyes bloodhounds! Joyce felt that this really must settle it.
Actual living bloodhounds would be more than a match for Joan.
Colonel Warden was sure of it too.

"Saves time," he was telling Mother in his high snappy voice. "Shows
us which way she's gone, you know. Best hounds in the country, these
two; never known 'em fail yet."

The dogs were limp and quiet as he led them through the wood, strange
ungainly mechanisms which a whiff of a scent could set in motion. A
pinafore, which Joan had worn at breakfast, was served to them for an
indication of the work they had to do; they snuffed at it languidly
for some seconds. Then the colonel unleashed them.

They smelled round and about like any other dogs for a while, till
one of them lifted his great head and uttered a long moaning cry.
Then, noses down, the men running behind them, they set off across
the ferns. Mother, still holding Joyce's hand, followed. The hounds
made a straight line for the wood at the point at which Joan had
entered it, slid in like frogs into water, while the men dodged and
crashed after them. Joyce and Mother came up with them at a place
where the bushes stood back, enclosing a little quiet space of turf
that lay open to the sky. The hounds were here, one lying down and
scratching himself, the other nosing casually and clearly without
interest about him.

"Dash it all," the colonel was saying; "she can't she simply can't
have been kidnapped in a balloon."

They tried the hounds again and again, always with the same result.
They ran their line to the same spot unhesitatingly, and then gave up
as though the scent went no farther. Nothing could induce them to
hunt beyond it.

"I can't understand this," said Colonel Warden, dragging at his
moustache. "This is queer." He stood glancing, around him as though
the shrubs and trees had suddenly become enemies.

The search was still going on when the time came for Joyce to go to
bed. It had spread from the wood across the fields, reinforced by
scores of sturdy volunteers, and automobiles had puffed away to
thread the mesh of little lanes that covered the countryside. Joyce
found it all terribly exciting. Fear for Joan she felt not at all.

"I know inside myself," she told Mother, "right down deep in the
middle of me, that Joan's all right."

"Bless you, my chick," said poor Mother. "I wish I could feel like
that. Go to bed now, like a good girl."

There was discomfort in the sight of Joan's railed cot standing empty
in the night nursery, but Joyce was tired and had scarcely begun to
be touched by it before she was asleep. She had a notion that during
the night Mother came in more than once, and she had a vague dream,
too, all about Joan and wood-ladies, of which she could not remember
much when she woke up. Joan was always dressed first in the morning,
being the younger of the pair, but now there was no Joan, and Nurse
was very gentle with Joyce and looked tired and as if she had been
crying.

Mother was not to be seen that morning; she had been up all night,
"till she broke down, poor thing," said Nurse, and Joyce was bidden
to amuse herself quietly in the nursery. But Mother was about again
at lunch time when Joyce went down to the dining room. She was very
pale and her eyes looked black and deep, and somehow t she seemed
suddenly smaller and younger, more nearly Joyce's age, than ever
before. They kissed each other, and the child would have tried to
comfort.

"No," said Mother, shaking her head. "No dear. Don't let's be sorry
for each other yet. It would be like giving up hope. And we haven't
done that, have we?"

"I haven't," said Joyce. "I know it's all right."

After lunch again Mother said she wouldn't be hungry till Joan came
home they went out together. There were no searchers now in the wood
and the garden was empty; the police had left no inch unscanned and
they were away, combing the countryside and spreading terror among
the tramps. The sun was strong upon the lawn, and the smell of the
roses was heavy on the air; across the hedge, the land rolled away to
clear perspectives of peace and beauty.

"Let's walk up and down," suggested Mother. "Anything's better than
sitting still. And don't talk, chick not just now."

They paced the length of the lawn, from the cedar to the gate which
led to the wood, perhaps a dozen times, hand in hand and in silence.
It was while their backs were turned to the wood that they heard the
gate click, and faced about to see who was coming. A blue-sleeved arm
thrust the gate open, and there advanced into the sunlight, coming
forth from the shadow as from a doorway Joan! Her round baby face,
with the sleek brown hair over it, the massive infantile body, the
sturdy bare legs, confronted them serenely. Mother uttered a deep
sigh it sounded like that and in a moment she was kneeling on the
ground with her arms round the baby.

"Joan, Joan," she said over and over again. "My little, little baby!"

Joan struggled in her embrace till she got an arm free, and then
rubbed her eyes drowsily.

"Hallo!" she said.

"But where have you been?" cried Mother. "Baby-girl, where have you
been all this time?"

Joan made a motion of her head and her free arm towards the wood, the
wood which had been searched a dozen times over like a pocket. "In
there," she answered carelessly. "Wiv the wood-ladies. I'm hungry!"

"My darling!" said Mother, and picked her up and carried her into the
house.

In the dining-room, with Mother at her side and Joyce opposite to
her, Joan fell to her food in her customary workmanlike fashion, and
between helpings answered questions in a fashion which only served to
darken the mystery of her absence.

"But there aren't any wood-ladies really, darling," remonstrated
Mother.

"There is," said Joan. "There's lots. They wanted to keep me but I
wouldn't stay. So I comed home, 'cause I was hungry."

"But," began Mother. "Where did they take you to?" she asked.

"I don't know," said Joan. "The one what I went to speak to gave me
her hand and tooked me to where there was more of them. It was a
place in the wood wiv grass to sit on and bushes all round, and they
gave me dead flowers to play wiv. Howwid old dead flowers!"

"Yes," said Mother. "What else?"

"There was anuvver little girl there," went on Joan. "Not a wood-lady
but a girl like me, what they'd tooked from somewhere. She was
wearing a greeny sort of dress like they was, and they wanted me to
put one on too. But I wouldn't."

"Why wouldn't you?" asked Joyce.

"'Cause I didn't want to be a wood-lady," replied Joan.

"Listen to me, darling," said Mother. "Didn't these people whom you
call wood-ladies take you away out of the wood? We searched the whole
wood, you know, and you weren't there at all."

"I was," said Joan. "I was there all the time, an' I heard Walter an'
Jenks calling. I cocked a snook at them an' the wood-ladies laughed
like leaves rustling."

"But where did you sleep last night?"

"I didn't sleep," said Joan, grasping her spoon anew. "I'se very
sleepy now."

She was asleep as soon as they laid her in bed, and Mother and Joyce
looked at each other across her cot, above her rosy and unconscious
face.

"God help us," said Mother in a whisper. "What is the truth of this?"

There was never any answer, any hint of a solution, save Joan's. And
she, as soon as she discovered that her experiences amounted to an
adventure, began to embroider them, and now she does not even know
herself. She has reached the age of seven, and it is long since she
has believed in anything so childish as wood-ladies.



IV

A MAN BEFORE THE MAST

In Tom Mowbray's boarding-house, the sailors who sat upon the narrow
benches round the big room ceased their talk as the door opened and
Tom Mowbray himself entered from the street. The men in the room, for
all the dreary stiffness of their shore-clothes, carried upon their
faces, in their hands shaped to the rasp of ropes, in every attitude
of their bodies, the ineradicable hall-mark of the sea which was the
arena of their lives; they salted the barren place with its vigor and
pungency. Pausing within the door, Tom Mowbray sent his pale
inexpressive glance flickering along the faces they turned towards
him.

"Well, boys," he said; "takin' it easy fer a spell?"

There was a murmur of reply from the men; they watched him warily,
knowing that he was not genial for nothing. He was a man of fifty or
more, bloated in body, with an immobile grey face and a gay white
moustache that masked his gross and ruthless mouth. He was dressed
like any other successful merchant, bulging waistcoat, showy linen
and all; the commodity in which he dealt was the flesh and blood of
seamen, and his house was eminent among those which helped the
water-front of San Francisco "the Barbary Coast," as sailors call it
to its unholy fame. He stood among the sunburnt, steady-eyed seamen
like a fungus in fresh grass.

"An' now, who's for a good ship?" he inquired. There was a sort of
mirth in his voice as he spoke. "Good wages, good grub, an' a soft
job. Don't all of ye speak at once."

The sailors eyed him warily. From the end of the room a white-haired
American looked up wryly.

"What's her name?" he asked.

"Name?" Tom Mowbray kept his countenance, though the name was the
cream of the joke. He paused, watching the faces of those who had
been ashore a week and were due to ship again when he should give the
word. "Oh, you don't want to be scared of her name; her name's all
right. She's the Etna."

Somebody laughed, and Tom Mowbray gave him an approving glance; the
others interchanged looks. The Etna had a reputation familiar to
seamen and a nickname too; they called her the "Hell-packet." Of all
the tall and beautiful ships which maintained their smartness and
their beauty upon the agony of wronged and driven seamen, the Etna
was the most terrible, a blue-water penitentiary, a floating place of
torment. To enhance the strange terror of her, the bitter devil who
was her captain carried his wife on board; the daily brutalities that
made her infamous went on under the eyes and within the hearing of a
woman; it added a touch of the grotesque to what was otherwise
fearful enough.

Tom Mowbray stood enjoying the dumb consternation of his victims.

"Well, who's for it?" he inquired. "Ain't there none of you that
wants a good ship like that Noo York an' back here, an' eighteen
dollars a month? Well, I s'pose I'll have to take my pick of yer."

They knew he had proposed the matter to them only in mockery of their
helplessness; they were at his mercy, and those he selected would
have to go. He would secure an advance of three months of their wages
as payment for their week or so of board; and they would desert
penniless in New York to escape the return voyage. There was no
remedy; it was almost a commonplace risk of their weary lives so
commonplace a risk that of all those men, accustomed to peril and
violence, there was none to rise and drive a fist into his sleek
face. But, from the back of the room, one, nursing a crossed knee,
with his pipe in his mouth, spoke with assurance.

"I'm not goin' aboard of her," he said.

Tom Mowbray's heavy brows lowered a little; he surveyed the speaker.
It was a young man, sitting remote from the windows, whose face, in
the shadows of the big, bare room, showed yet a briskness of
coloring. His name Tom remembered it with an effort was Goodwin,
Daniel Goodwin; he had been paid off from a "limejuicer" little more
than a week before.

"Oh, you're not goin' aboard of her?" he queried slowly.

"No," answered the young man calmly. "I'm not."

It was defiance, it was insult; but Tom Mowbray could stand that. He
smoothed out his countenance, watching while the young man's neighbor
on the bench nudged him warningly.

"Well, I gotta find a crowd for her," he said in tones of
resignation. "I dunno how I'm goin' to do it, though."

He sighed, the burlesque sigh of a fat man pitying himself, and
passed through the room to the door at the far end. Not till it had
closed behind him did talk resume. A man who had been three weeks
ashore leant back against the wall and let his breath escape in a
sigh, which was not burlesque. For him there was no hope; he was as
much doomed as if a judge had pronounced sentence on him.

"Oh, hell!" he said. "Wonder if he'll let me have a dollar to get a
drink 'fore I go aboard of her?"

The others turned their eyes on him curiously; whatever happened to
them, he was a man who would sail in the Etna; already he was
isolated and tragic.

The neighbor who had nudged young Goodwin nudged him again.

"Come out," he breathed into the ear that the young man bent towards
him. "Come out; I want to speak t' ye."

In the street, the mean cobbled street of the Barbary Coast, the man
who nudged took Goodwin by the arm and spoke urgently.

"Say, ain't ye got no sense?" he demanded. "Talkin' like that to Tom
Mowbray! Don't ye know that's the way to fix him to ship ye aboard
the 'Hell-packet?'"

"He can't ship me aboard any 'Hell-packet,'" answered Goodwin
serenely. "When I ship, I ship myself, an' I pay my board in cash.
There ain't any advance note to be got out o' me."

The other halted and drew Goodwin to halt, facing him at the edge of
the sidewalk, where a beetle-browed saloon projected its awning above
them. Like Goodwin, he was young and brown; but unlike Goodwin there
was a touch of sophistication, of daunting experience, in the
seriousness of his face. The two had met and chummed after the
fashion of sailors, who make and lose their friends as the hazard of
the hour directs.

"You don't know Tom Mowbray," he said in a kind of affectionate
contempt. "He's, he's a swine an' he's cute! Didn't you hear about
him shippin' a corpse aboard o' the Susquehanna, an' drawin' three
months' advance for it? Why, you ain't got a show with him if he's
got a down on ye."

Goodwin smiled. "Maybe I don't know Tom Mowbray," he said; "but it's
a sure thing Tom Mowbray don't know me. Come on an' have a drink,
Jim. This thing of the Etna it's settled. Come on!"

He led the way into the saloon beside them; Jim, growling warningly,
followed him.

At twenty-six, it was Goodwin's age, one should be very much a man.
One's moustache is confirmed in its place; one has the stature and
muscle of a man, a man's tenacity and resistance, while the heart of
boyishness still pulses in one's body. It is the age at which
capacity is the ally of impulse, when heart and hand go paired in a
perfect fraternity. One is as sure of oneself as a woman of thirty,
and with as much and as little reason. Goodwin, when he announced
that he, at any rate, would not be one of the crew of the Etna, spoke
out of a serene confidence in himself. He knew himself for a fine
seaman and a reasonably fine human being; he had not squandered his
wages, and he did not mean to be robbed of his earnings when he
shipped himself again. It was his first visit to San Francisco; the
ports he knew were not dangerous to a man who took care of himself,
who was not a drunkard, and would fight at need. He showed as
something under six feet tall, long in the limb and moving handily,
with eyes of an angry blue in a face tanned russet by wind and sun.

In the saloon he laughed down Jim's instances of Tom Mowbray's
treachery and cunning, lounging with an elbow on the bar, careless
and confident under the skeptical eyes of the white-jacketed barman.

"I reckon Tom Mowbray knows when he's safe," he said. "Why, if he was
to do any o' them things to me I'd get him if I had to dig for him.
Yes, sir!"

From thence the course of events ran as anyone familiar with the
Barbary Coast might have prophesied. They returned to the
boarding-house for supper and joined their fellows at the long table
in the back room, and were waited on by Tom Mowbray's "runners."
Mowbray himself, with his scared, lean wife and his wife's crippled
brother, had a table apart from the men; as he ate he entertained
himself by baiting the unhappy cripple, till the broken man stammered
tearfully across the table at him, shaking and grimacing in a nervous
frenzy, which Tom Mowbray always found comical. The woman between
them sat with her eyes downcast and her face bitter and still; they
made a picture of domesticity at which the sailors stared in a
fascination of perplexity, while the hard-faced "runners" in their
shirt-sleeves carried the plates to and from the kitchen, and the
ritual of the evening meal proceeded to its finish.

If there was in Goodwin a quality more salient than his youthful
force and his trust in his own capacity, it was the manner he had of
seeing absorbedly the men and things that presented themselves to his
eyes, so that even in dull and trivial matters he gathered strong
impressions and vivid memories. The three people at the little table
made a group from which, while he ate, he could not withdraw his
eyes. The suffering passivity of the woman, the sly, sinister humor
in Tom Mowbray's heavy, grey face, the livid and impotent hate that
frothed in the crippled man, and his strange jerky gestures, the
atmosphere of nightmare cruelty and suffering that enveloped them
like a miasma these bit themselves into his imagination and left it
sore. He saw and tasted nothing of what he ate and drank; he was lost
in watching the three at the other table; the man who refilled his
cup with coffee winked across his head to one of the others as though
in mirth at his abstraction.

In the ordinary way he would have gone for a walk up-town with his
friend after supper; but he was not in a mood for company that
evening and found himself sleepy besides. He went upstairs to the
bedroom he shared with two other men to get some tobacco he had
there, and discovered in himself so strong an inclination to slumber
that he decided to go to bed forthwith. He lit his pipe and sat down
on his bed to take his boots off. He had one boot unlaced but still
on his foot when his pipe dropped from his lips. Across his drugged
and failing brain there flickered for an instant the blurred shape of
a suspicion.

"What's the matter with me?" he half cried; and tried to rise to his
feet.

He knew he had failed to stand up and had fallen back on the bed.
With his last faculties he resisted the tides of darkness that rushed
in upon him; then his grasp upon consciousness loosened and his face,
which had been knitted in effort, relaxed. When half an hour later
Tom Mowbray and two of his "runners" came to find him, he lay,
scarcely breathing, in the appearance of a profound and natural
sleep.

It was thirty-six hours later when a vague consciousness of pain,
growing upon his poisoned nerves, sharpened to a climax, and he
opened his eyes, lying where he found himself without moving. It took
him some minutes before he brought his mind into co-ordination with
his senses to realize what he saw. Then it was plain to him that he
was lying upon the bare slats of a bunk in the narrow forecastle of a
ship. Its door, hooked open, made visible a slice of sunlit deck and
a wooden rail beyond it, from which the gear of the foremast slanted
up. Within the forecastle only three of the bunks contained
mattresses and blankets, and there was no heave and sway under him to
betoken a ship under sail in a seaway.

Slowly the sailor within him asserted itself. "This hooker's at
anchor!"

By degrees he began to account for himself. Recollection returned: he
had waked in a bare and bedless bunk, but it was at Tom Mowbray's he
had fallen asleep. He remembered going up to his room and the
sleepiness that had pressed itself upon him there. And there was a
thought, a doubt, that had been with him at the last. It eluded him
for a moment; then he remembered and sat up, in an access of vigor
and anger as he recalled it.

"Knock-out drops," he said. "Yes, by God! Tom Mowbray's shanghaied
me!"

His head ached, his skin and his mouth were parched as if by a fever.
Stiffly he swung himself over the edge of his bunk and went on feet
that were numb and uncertain through the door to the deck. He was
sore all over from lying on the bare slats of the bunk, and the dregs
of the drug still clogged his mind and muscles; but like the flame in
a foul lantern there burned in him the fires of anger.

"Shanghaied!" he repeated as he reeled to the rail and caught at a
backstay to steady himself. "Well, the man that did it wants to hide
when I get ashore again."

He cast his eyes aft over the ship on which he found himself, summing
her up with an automatic expertness. An American ship, it was plain,
and a three-skysail-yarder at that, with a magnificent stature and
spread of spars. Abeam of her San Francisco basked along its shore;
she was at an anchor well out in the bay. What ship was it that he
had viewed from a dock-head lying just there? The answer was on his
lips even before his eyes discovered the boat she carried on top of
the fo'c'sle, with her name lettered upon it. Tom Mowbray had proved
his power by shanghaiing him aboard the Etna!

He said nothing: the situation was beyond mere oaths, but wrath
surged in him like a flood.

Around the for'ard house, walking with measured steps, came Mr. Fant,
the mate of the Etna, and accosted him.

"Sobered up, have ye?" said Mr. Fant.

"Yes, sir," said Goodwin.

"That's right," said Mr. Fant, smiling, surveying him with an
appearance of gentle interest. "Knock-out drops?" he inquired.

"Yes, sir," answered Goodwin again, watching him.

"Ah!" Mr. Fant shook his head. "Well, you're all right now," he said.
"Stick yer head in a bucket an' ye'll be ready to turn to."

Mr. Fant had his share in the fame of the Etna; he was a part of her
character. Goodwin, though his mind still moved slowly, eyed him
intently, gauging the man's strange and masked quality, probing the
mildness of his address for the thing it veiled. He saw the mate of
the Etna as a spare man of middle-age, who would have been tall but
for the stoop of his shoulders. His shaven face was constricted
primly; he had the mouth of an old maid, and stood slack-bodied with
his hands sunk in the pockets of his jacket. Only the tightness of
his clothes across his chest and something sure and restrained in his
gait as he walked hinted of the iron thews that governed his lean
body; and, while he spoke in the accents of an easy civility, his
stony eyes looked on Goodwin with an unblinking and remorseless
aloofness. It was not hard to imagine him, when the Etna, with her
crew seduced or drugged to man her, should be clear of soundings and
the business of the voyage put in shape, when every watch on deck
would be a quaking ordeal of fear and pain, and every watch below an
interval for mere despair.

The vision of it made Goodwin desperate.

"I haven't signed on, sir," he protested. "I've been shanghaied here.
This ain't."

He paused under the daunting compulsion of Mr. Fant's eye.

"You've signed on all right," said Mr. Fant. "Your name's John Smith
an' you signed on yesterday. You don't want to make any mistake about
that, Smith."

He spoke as mildly as ever and yet was menacing and terrible. But
Goodwin was insistent.

"My name's Goodwin," he persisted. "Tom Mowbray drugged me and shoved
me on board. I want to go ashore."

Mr. Fant turned to go aft. "You get yer head into a bucket," he
counselled. "Hurry up, now. There's work waitin' to be done."

"I won't!" shouted Goodwin.

"Eh!" Mr. Fant's voice was still mild as he uttered the exclamation,
but before Goodwin could repeat himself he had moved. As if some
spring in him had been released from tension, the mild and prim Mr.
Fant whirled on his heel, and a fist took Goodwin on the edge of the
jaw and sent him gasping and clucking on to his back; while, with the
precision of a movement rehearsed and practiced, Mr. Fant's booted
foot swung forward and kicked him into the scuppers. He lay there on
his back, looking up in an extremity of terror and astonishment at
the unmoved face of the mate.

"Get up, Smith," commanded Mr. Fant. Goodwin obeyed, scarcely
conscious of the pain in his face and flank in the urgency of the
moment. "Now you get the bucket, same as I told you, and when you've
freshened yourself come aft an' I'll start you on a job. See?"

"Aye, aye, sir," responded Goodwin mechanically, and started for-ard.
The Etna had absorbed him into her system; he was initiated already
to his role of a driven beast; but tenacious as an altar fire there
glowed yet within him the warmth of his anger against Tom Mowbray. It
was secret, beyond the reach of Mr. Fant's fist; the fist was only
another item in Tom Mowbray's debt.

From his place on the crossjack-yard, to which Mr. Fant sent him,
Goodwin had presently a view of the captain's wife. She came to the
poop from the cabin companion-way and leaned for a while on the
taffrail, seeming to gaze at the town undulating over the hills,
dwarfed by the distance. It was when she turned to go down again that
Goodwin had a full view of her face, bleak and rigid, with greying
hair drawn tightly back from the temples, as formal and blank as the
face of a clock. It was told of her that she would sit knitting in
her chair by the mizzen fife-rail while at the break of the poop a
miserable man was being trodden and beaten out of the likeness of
humanity and never lift her head nor shift her attitude for all his
cries and struggles. It was her presence aboard that touched the
man-slaughtering Etna with her quality of the macabre.

"But she won't see me broken up," swore Goodwin to himself as her
head vanished in the hood of the companion. "No not if I've got to
set the damn ship alight!"

He made the acquaintance, when work was over for the day, of his
fellows in ill-fortune, the owners of the three occupied bunks in the
forecastle. As if the Etna had laid herself out to starve him of
every means of comfort, they proved to be "Dutchmen" that is to say,
Teutons of one nationality or another and therefore, by sea-canons,
his inferiors, incapable of sharing his feelings and not to be
trusted with his purpose. One question, however, they were able to
answer satisfactorily. It had occurred to him that since even Tom
Mowbray could only get men for the Etna by drugging them, her
officers would probably take special precautions to guard against
desertion.

"Do they lock us in here at night?" he asked of the three of them
when they sat at supper in the port fo'c'sle.

They stared at him uncomprehendingly. For them, helots of the sea,
the Etna's terrors were nothing out of the way; all ships used them
harshly; life itself was harsh enough. Their bland blond faces were
stupid and amiable.

"Log us in!" answered one of them. "No! For what shall they log us
in?"

"That's all right, then," said Goodwin and let them continue to stare
at him, ruminating his reasons for the question.

There was a fourth "Dutchman" who slumbered through the day in the
starboard fo'c'sle and sat all night in the galley, in the exercise
of his functions as night-watchman. His lamp shed a path of light
from the galley door to the rail when, his fellows in the fo'c'sle
being, audibly asleep, Goodwin rose from his bunk and came forth to
the deck. Far away, across the level waters of the great bay, the
lights of the city made an illumination against the background of the
night; overhead there was a sky bold with stars; the Etna floated
mute in a rustle of moving waters. There were no ships near her; only
now and again a towboat racing up from the Golden Gates went by with
the noise of a breaking wave on a steep shore. In the break of the
poop there showed the light of Mr. Fant's window, where he lay in his
bunk, relaxing his grisly official personality with a book and a
cigar.

In deft haste Goodwin stepped to the fore side of the fo'c'sle, where
he would be hidden should the watchman take a fancy to look out of
his galley. In him a single emotion was constant: he had a need to
find Tom Mowbray. It was more than an idea or a passion: it was like
the craving of a drug maniac for his poison. The shore that blinked
at him across the black waters was not inaccessible under the impulse
of that lust of anger; he was at all times a strong swimmer. Under
shelter of the deckhouse he stripped his clothes and made of them it
was only his shirt and trousers a bundle which the belt that carried
his sheath-knife fastened upon his head, descending under his chin
like a helmet-strap. With infinite precaution to be unheard he went
in this trim across the deck to the rail.

The Etna's chain-plates were broad as a frigate's; he had but to let
himself down carefully and he was in the water without a splash. A
dozen strokes took him clear of her, and presently he paused,
up-ending and treading water, to look back at her. She stood up over
her anchors like a piece of architecture, poising like a tower; the
sailor in him paid tribute to the builders who had conceived her
beauty. They had devised a ship: it needed Mr. Fant and his
colleagues to degrade her into a sea-going prophet and give aptness
to her by-name of "Hell-packet." He was clear of her now; he might
fail to reach the shore and drown, but at least the grey woman aft
would never see his humiliation and defeat. He turned over, setting
his face to the waterside lights of the city, and struck out.

It was a long swim, and it was fortunate for him that he took the
water on the turn of the tide, so that where the tail of the ebb set
him down the first of the flood bore him back. The stimulus of the
chill and the labor of swimming cleared the poison from his body and
brain; he swam steadily, with eyes fixed on the lights beading the
waterside and mind clenched on the single purpose to find Tom
Mowbray, to deal with him, to satisfy the anger which ached in him
like a starved appetite. How he would handle him, what he would do
with him, when he found him, did not occupy his thoughts; it was a
purpose and not a plan which was taking him ashore. He had the man's
pursy large face for ever in his consciousness; the vision of it was
a spur, an exasperation; he found himself swimming furiously, wasting
strength, in the thought of encountering it.

Good luck and not calculation brought him ashore on the broadside of
the Barbary Coast, in a small dock where a Norwegian barque lay
slumbering alongside the wharf. Her watchman, if she had one, was not
in sight; it was upon her deck that he dressed himself, fumbling
hurriedly into the shirt and trousers which he had failed, after all,
to keep dry. He jerked his belt tight about him and felt the
sheath-knife which it carried pressing against his back. He reached
back and slid it round to his right side, where his hand would drop
on it easily; it might chance that before the night was over he would
need a weapon.

He had no notion of the hour nor of the length of time he had been in
the water. As he passed bare-footed from the wharf he was surprised
to find the shabby street empty under its sparse lamps. It lay
between its mean houses vacant and unfamiliar in its quietude; it
seemed to him as though the city waited in a conscious hush till he
should have done what he had come to do. His bare feet on the
sidewalk slapped and shuffled, and he hurried along close to the
walls; the noise he made, for all his caution, appeared to him
monstrous, enough to wake the sleepers in the houses and draw them to
their windows to see the man who was going to find Tom Mowbray.

An alley between gapped and decrepit board fences brought him to the
back of the house he sought; he swung himself into the unsavory back
yard of it without delaying to seek for the gate. The house was over
him, blank and lightless, its roof a black heap against the night
sky. He paused to look up at it. He was still without any plan; not
even now did he feel the need of one. To go in to break in, if that
were the quickest way to stamp his stormy way up the room where Tom
Mowbray was sleeping, to wrench him from his bed and then let loose
the maniac fury that burned within him all that was plain to do. He
cast a glance at the nearest window, and then it was that the door of
the house opened.

He was standing to one side, a dozen paces from it; a single,
noiseless step took him to the wall, against which he backed,
screened by the darkness, and waited to see who would come forth. A
figure appeared and lingered in the doorway, and he caught the
sibilance of a whisper, and immediately upon it a dull noise of
tapping, as though someone beat gently and slowly against the door
with a clenched hand. It was a noise he had heard before; his
faculties strained themselves to identify it. Then a second figure
appeared, smaller than the first, moving with a strange gait, and he
knew. It was the cripple, Mowbray's brother-in-law, and it was his
leather-shod crutch which had tapped on the floor of the passage. The
two figures moved down the yard together, and presently, as they
passed from the shadow of the house and came within the feeble light
of a lamp that burned at the mouth of the alley, he saw that the
taller of the two was Tom Mowbray's wife. They found the gate in the
fence and opened it, manifestly hesitating at the strident creaking
it made, and passed through. At no moment were they clear to see, but
to Goodwin's eyes their very gait was in some way expressive of a
tragic solemnity that clad them.

He remained silent in his place as they went along the alley towards
the street, passing him at arm's length on the other side of the
fence. Their footsteps were muffled on the unpaved ground of the
alley, but there was another noise which he heard the noise of the
woman weeping weeping brokenly and openly. Then the cripple's harsh,
hopeless voice spoke.

"Anyway, we're alone together again for a bit, Sally," he croaked.

The woman checked her sobs to answer. "Yes, honey," she replied.

Goodwin waited till the tapping of the crutch had receded. "So
they've quit him at last," he reflected. "And" he stepped forth from
his hiding place briskly "they've left the door open. Now for Tom
Mowbray!"

Once within the door he was no longer careful to be silent. The house
was dark, and he had to grope his way to the stairs, or he would have
run at and up them at the top of his speed. The place seemed full of
doors closed upon sleeping people; someone on an upper floor was.
snoring with the noise of a man strangling. He moved among them
awkwardly, but he knew which was the room that harbored his man. The
door of it was before him at last. He fumbled and found the handle.

"Now!" he said aloud, and thrust it open.

His vision of vengeance had shown him the room that was to be its
arena, but this room was dark and he could not see it. He had not
allowed for that. He swore as the door swung to behind him.

"Mowbray!" he called. "Mowbray, you blasted robber! Wake up an' get
what's comin' to you!"

There was no answering stir to tell him the direction in which to
spring with hands splayed for the grapple. The room had a strange
stillness; in spite of himself he held his breath to listen for Tom
Mowbray's breathing. His right arm brushed the hilt of his
sheath-knife as he stood, tense and listening. There was no sound of
breathing, but there was something.

It was like the slow tick of a very quiet clock, measured and
persistent. He could not make it out.

"Mowbray!" he called once more, and the only answer was that
pat-a-pat that became audible again when he ceased to call.

"I bet I'll wake you," he said, and stepped forward feeling before
him with his hands. They found the surface of a table, struck and
knocked over a glass that stood upon it, and found a box of matches.
"Ah!" grunted Goodwin triumphantly.

The match-flame languished ere it stood steady and let the room be
seen. Goodwin had passed the bed and was standing with his back to
it. With the match in his fingers and his eyes dazzled by its light,
he turned and approached it. The face of Mowbray showed wide-open
eyes at him from the pillow. The bedclothes lay across his chest; one
arm hung over the edge of the bed with the hand loose and limp. And
above his neck his night-clothes and the linen of the bed were sodden
and dreadful with blood that had flowed from a frightful wound in the
throat. What had sounded like the ticking of a clock was now the
noise of its dripping. "Drip!" it went; "drip-drip!"

The match-flame stung his fingers and went out.

"Hell!" cried Goodwin, and out of the darkness panic swooped on him.

There was a moment when he tried to find the door and could not,
alone in the blackness of the room with the murdered man. He caught
at himself desperately to save himself from screaming, and found the
matchbox was in his hand. He failed to light two matches, standing
off the lunatic terror that threatened him.

Somewhere out of sight he knew that Tom Mowbray's eyes were open. The
third match fired and he had the door by the handle. It restored him
like a grip of a friendly hand.

He was able to pause in the door while the match burned and his mind
raced. There leaped to the eye of his imagination the two stricken
figures he had seen slinking from the house, the weeping of the
woman, the muffled tap of the man's crutch. There followed, in an
inevitable sequence, the memory of them in their torment as they sat
at meat with Tom Mowbray.

"I wonder which o' them done it?" he thought, and shuddered. Where he
stood he could see the still face of the dead man, with its shape of
power and pride overcast now by the dreadful meekness of the dead. He
could not pursue the thought, for another came up to drive it from
his mind.

"Supposin' somebody woke and come out and saw me here!"

To think of it was enough. Drawing the door to behind him he went
down the stairs. He had been careless of noise in ascending; now each
creak of the warped boards was an agony. The snorer had turned over
in bed; the awful house had a graveyard stillness. He held his breath
till he was clear of it and again in the hushed and empty street.

"The Etna for mine, if I can make it," he breathed to himself as he
went at a run in the shadow of the silent houses. "God! If anyone was
to see me!"

And thus it was that the first pallor of dawn beheld the incredible
and unprecedented sight of an able seaman, with his clothes strapped
upon his head, swimming at peril of his life in San Francisco bay, to
get aboard of the "Hell-packet."



V

THE GIRL

The little mission hall showed to the shabby waterside street of
Jersey City its humble face of brick and the modest invitation of its
open door, from which at intervals there overflowed the sudden music
of a harmonium within. Goodwin, ashore for the evening, with the
empty hours of his leisure weighing on him like a burden, heard that
music rise about him, as he moved along the saloon-dotted sidewalk,
with something of the mild surprise of a swimmer who passes out of a
cold into a warm current. For lack of anything better to do, he had
been upon the point of returning to his ship, where she lay in her
dock. He had not spoken to a soul since he had come ashore at
sundown, and the simple music was like a friendly prompting. He
hesitated a moment for he was not a frequenter of missions then
turned in at the entrance of the hall.

The music of the harmonium and of the voices that sang with it seemed
to swell at him as he pushed open the swing door and tiptoed in
toward a back seat, careful to be noiseless. But there were heads
that turned, none the less heads of tame sailors from the ships, for
whose service the mission struggled to exist, and a few sleek faces
of shore folk; and, on the low platform at the upper end of the hall,
the black-coated, whiskered missioner who presided over the gathering
craned his neck to look at the new-comer, without ceasing to sing
with vigor. It was, in short, such a meeting as an idle sailor might
drop in upon in any one of a hundred ports. Goodwin recognized the
very atmosphere of it its pervading spirit of a mild and very honest
geniality, the peculiar nasal tone of its harmonium, and the timidity
of the singing. Standing in his place in the back row of seats, he
was going on to identify it at further points, when he felt a touch
on his arm.

"Eh?" he demanded under his breath, turning.

A tall girl was offering him a little red, paper-covered hymn-book,
open at the hymn that was then being sung, her ungloved finger
pointing him the very verse and line. He did not at once take it. She
had come upon him surprisingly, and now, while he stared at her, he
was finding her surprising in herself. Under the brim of her hat her
face showed gentle and soft, with something of a special kindliness;
and, because others were watching her, she had a little involuntary
smile of embarrassment.

She glanced up at him shyly, and let her eyes fall before his. The
finger with which she pointed him the place on the page seemed to
Goodwin, whose hands were like hoofs for callousness and size,
exquisite and pathetic in its pink slenderness. It was not merely
that she was beautiful and feminine in that moment Goodwin could not
have been positive that she was beautiful but a dim allurement, a
charm made up of the grace of her bowed head, her timid gesture of
proffering him the book, her nearness, and her fragile delicacy of
texture, enhanced and heightened the surprise of her.

"Gosh!" breathed Goodwin, unthinking; then, "Thank you, miss," as he
took the hymn-book from her.

She smiled once more, and went back to her place at the farther end
of the row of seats in front of Goodwin's, where he could still see
her. He found himself staring at her in a sort of perplexity; she had
revealed herself to him with a suddenness that gave her a little the
quality of an apparition. The bend of her head above her book brought
to view, between the collar of her coat and her soft brown hair, a
gleam of white nape that fascinated him; she was remote, ethereal,
wondrously delicate and mysterious. He sprawled in his place, when
the hymn was over, with an arm over the back of his seat, intent
merely to see her and slake the appetite of his eyes.

"She's she's a looker, all right!" He had a need to make some comment
upon this uplifting experience of his, and this was the best he could
do.

He had come in late sailors' missions are used to late-comers and
early-goers and it was not long before the simple service came to a
close and the meeting began to break up. Goodwin took his cap and
rose, watching the tall girl as she went forward to join a couple of
older women. The black-coated man came down from the platform and
made his way toward Goodwin, amiable intentions visibly alight in his
whiskered face.

"Haven't seen you here before," he said at Goodwin's elbow. "What
ship d'you belong to?"

Goodwin, recalled to himself, looked down into the kindly, narrow
face of the missioner. He himself was tall, a long-limbed young man,
with a serious, darkly tanned face in which the blue of the eyes
showed up strongly; and in his bearing and the fashion of his address
there was a touch of that arrogance which men acquire who earn their
bread at the hourly hazard of their lives.

"Oh, I just dropped in," he said awkwardly. "I belong to th' Etna,
lyin' in the dock down yonder."

The missioner smiled and nodded.

"Etna, eh? Ah, yes. Somebody was tellin' me about the Etna. A hard
ship that's what you call her, eh?"

Goodwin nodded, and considered the face upturned toward his own
innocent, benevolent, middle-aged, worn, too, with hopes and
disappointments, yet unscarred by such bitter knowledge as men gained
early aboard the Etna.

"We call her the 'Hell-packet,'" he answered seriously.

The missioner nodded, and his smile, though it flickered, survived.

"It's an ugly name," he said; "but maybe she deserves it. An' so you
saw our door open and just stepped in? It's always open in the
evenin's and on Sundays, an' we'll always be glad to see you. Now,
I'd like to make you acquainted with one of our young ladies, so's
you won't feel you're a stranger, eh? An' then maybe you'll come
again."

"Oh, I dunno" began Goodwin, fidgeting.

But the missioner was already beckoning with a black-sleeved arm.
His pale elderly face seemed to shine.

Goodwin turned, looked to see whom he summoned, and forthwith dropped
his cap, so that he was bent double to pick it up when the young
lady, the tall girl who had offered him the hymn-book, arrived. He
came upright again face to face with her, abandoned by his faculties,
a mere sop of embarrassment before the softness of her eyes and the
smile of her lips.

The missioner's official voice brayed between them benevolently.
Goodwin had a momentary sense that there was a sort of indecency in
thus trumpeting forth the introduction; it should have been done
solemnly, gracefully, like a ceremony.

"Miss James," said the missioner noisily, "here's a friend that's
visitin' us for the first time. Now, I want you to persuade him to
come again, an' tell him he'll be welcome just as often as he likes
to come an' see us. His name's, er."

"Goodwin," replied the sailor awkwardly.

The missioner shook his hand warmly, putting eloquence into the
shake. He cut it short to intercept a brace of seamen who were making
for the door. Goodwin saw him bustle up and detain them with his
greeting: "Haven't seen you here before. What ship d'you belong to?"
Then he turned back to the girl.

"Do you belong to a ship?" she asked.

"Yes," he answered. "The Etna."

He had been eager to hear her speak. She had a voice with shadows in
it, a violin voice. Goodwin, relishing it like an apt gift, could
only tell himself that it fitted and completed that strange effect
she had of remoteness and unreality.

"What was your last port?" she asked.

He told her, and she went on with her conventional string of
questions to make talk, to carry out the missioner's purpose in
summoning her. The danger of seafaring, the strangeness of life in
ships, the charm of travel she went through the whole list, getting
answers as conventional as her queries. He was watching her, taking
pleasure in her quality and aspect; and at last he saw, with a small
thrill, that she was watching him likewise.

If he had been a vainer man, he might have been aware that he, in his
way, was as well worth looking at as she in hers. He was big and
limber, in the full ripeness of his youth, sunburned and level-eyed.
His life in ships had marked him as plainly as a branding-iron. There
was present in him that air which men have, secret yet visible, who
know familiarly the unchanging horizons, the strange dawns, the
tempest-pregnant skies of the sea. For the girl he was as
unaccountable as she for him.

"Say, Miss James," he asked suddenly, breaking in on her twentieth
polite question, "d'you come to this joint, I mean, to this meetin'
house every night?"

Her face seemed to shape itself naturally to a smile; she smiled now.

"I can't come every night," she answered; "but I come pretty often.
I, I hope you'll come sometimes, now."

Goodwin discounted that; it was no more than the missioner had bidden
her to say.

"Are you goin' to be here tomorrow?" he demanded.

Her mild, pretty face flushed faintly; the meaning of his question
was palpable.

"Ye-es," she hesitated; "I expect I'll be coming to-morrow."

"That's all right, then," said Goodwin cheerfully. "An' I'll be
along, too."

The elderly woman whom she had left at the missioner's summons was
hovering patiently. Goodwin held out his hand.

"Good night, Miss James," he said.

She gave him her hand, and he took it within his own, enveloping its
pale slenderness in his rope-roughened palm. He held it just long
enough to make her raise her eyes and meet his; then he released her,
and, avoiding the anti-climax of a further talk with the missioner,
passed out of the hall to the dark and sparsely peopled street.

At a small saloon whose lights spilled themselves across his path, he
got himself a glass of beer; he was feeling just such a thirst as a
man knows after nervous and exacting labor. The blond, white-jacketed
barman glanced at him curiously, marking perhaps something distraught
and rapt in his demeanor. Goodwin, ignoring him, took his beer and
leaned an elbow on the bar, looking round the place.

A couple of Germans were playing a game at a table near the door. A
man in the dumb-solemn stage of drunkenness stood regarding his empty
glass with owlish fixity. It was all consistent with a certain manner
and degree of life; it was commonplace, established in the order of
things. In the same order were the dreary street without, and the
Etna, loading at her wharf for the return voyage to San Francisco.
Their boundaries were the limits of lives; one had but to cross them,
to adventure beyond them, and all the world was different. A dozen
steps had taken him from the sidewalk into the mission hall and the
soft-glowing wonder of the girl; another dozen steps had replaced him
on the sidewalk. It almost seemed as if a man might choose what world
he would live in.

"Feelin' bad?" queried the barman softly; he could no longer contain
his curiosity.

"Me!" exclaimed Goodwin. "No!"

"Well," said the barman apologetically Goodwin was a big and
dangerous-looking young man "you're lookin' mighty queer, anyway."
And he proceeded to wipe the bar industriously.

The Etna had left San Francisco with a crew of fourteen men before
the mast, of whom twelve had been "Dutchmen." On her arrival in New
York, these twelve had deserted forthwith, forfeiting the pay due to
them rather than face the return voyage under the Etna's officers.
There remained in her forecastle now only Goodwin and one other, an
old seaman named Noble, a veteran who had followed the sea and shared
the uncertain fate of ships since the days of single topsails.

Noble was seated on his battered chest when Goodwin unhooked the
fo'c'sle door and entered. A globe-lamp that hung above him shed its
light upon his silver head as he bent over his work of patching a
pair of dungaree overalls, and he looked up in mild welcome of the
other's return. His placidity, his venerable and friendly aspect,
gave somehow to the bare forecastle, with its vacant bunks like empty
coffin-shelves in a vault, an air of domesticity, the comfortable
quality of a home. Save for brief intervals between voyages, in
sailors' boarding-houses, such places had been "home" to Noble for
fifty years.

Goodwin rehooked the door, and stood outside the globe-lamp's circle
of dull light while he took off his coat. Old Noble, sail needle
between his fingers, looked up from his work amiably.

"Well?" he queried. "Been havin' a hell of a good time uptown, eh?"

"That's so," retorted Goodwin shortly. "A hell of a time an' all."

The old man nodded and began to sew again, sailor fashion, thrusting
the big needle with the leather "palm" which seamen use instead of a
thimble. Goodwin, standing by his bunk, began to cut himself a fill
for his pipe.

"Ain't been robbed, have ye?" inquired old Noble.

In his view, and according to his experience, a sailor with money on
him ran peculiar risks when he went ashore. When Goodwin had been
"shanghaied" in San Francisco drugged and carried on board
unconscious while another man "signed on" for him and drew three
months of his wages in advance those who shipped him had omitted to
search him, and his money-belt was intact.

"Robbed? No!" answered Goodwin impatiently.

He lit his pipe, drawing strongly at the pungent ship's tobacco, and
seated himself on the edge of the lower bunk, facing old Noble. The
old man continued to sew, his hand moving rhythmically to and fro
with the needle, his work spread conveniently in his lap. But for the
rusty red of his tanned skin, he looked like a handsome and wise old
woman.

"Jim," said Goodwin at last.

"Yes?" The old man did not look up.

"There wasn't nothin' doin' ashore there," said Goodwin. "I just went
for a walk along the street, and then I well, there wasn't nothin'
doin', ye see, so I went into a sort o' mission that there was."

"Eh?" Old Noble raised his head sharply and peered at him. "Ye ain't
been an' got religion, Dan?"

"No, I haven't," answered Goodwin. "But say, Jim, I went into the
place, and there was a girl there. She come over to loan me a
hymn-book first of all, an' afterwards what ye laughin' at, blast
ye?"

Old Noble had uttered no sound, but he had bent his head over his
sewing and his broad shoulders were shaking. He lifted a face of
elderly, cynical mirth.

"It ain't nothin', Dan," he protested. "It's just me thinkin' first
ye'd bin robbed and then ye'd got religion; an' all the time it's
just a girl ye've seen. Go on, Dan; how much did she get out of ye?"

"Stow that!" warned Goodwin. "She wasn't that kind. This one was say,
Jim, if you was to see her just once, you'd know things ashore ain't
all as bad as you fancy. Sort of soft, she was all tender and gentle
and shining! Gosh, there ain't no words to put her in. I didn't know
there was any girls like that."

"Nor me," put in old Noble dryly. He inspected Goodwin with a shrewd
and suspicious eye. For him, a citizen of the womanless seas, beauty,
grace, femininity were no more than a merchandise. "Then, to put it
straight, she didn't get yer money from ye?" he demanded.

"No, she didn't," retorted Goodwin. "Not a cent, is that plain
enough? Ain't you ever known no women but the rotten ones, man?"

Noble shook his head.

"Then you don't know what you're talkin' about," said Goodwin. "This
one it ain't no use tellin' you, Jim. I seen her, that's all; an' I'm
goin' to quit. This sailorizin' game ain't the only game there is,
an' I'm done with it."

"Ah!" The old man sat with both gnarled and labor-stained hands lying
upon the unfinished work in his lap. The cynical, half-humorous
expression faded from his thin, strong face. He frowned at the
younger man consideringly, seriously.

"Then she did get something out o' ye," he said harshly. "You're
talkin' like a fool, Dan. This old ship ain't no soft berth, I know;
but then, you ain't no quitter, either. This girl's got ye goin'; ye
want to watch out."

"Quitter!" Goodwin took him up hotly. They faced each other across
the narrow fo'c'sle vehemently; their shadows sprawled on deck and
bulkhead as they bent forward and drew back in the stress of talk.
"When a man's shanghaied aboard a blasted hooker like this, with
three months of his wages stolen before he gets the knockout drops
out o' his head, is he a quitter when he takes his chance to leave
her an' look for a white man's job?"

"Yes, he is," answered Noble. "You're a sailor, ain't you? Then stick
by your ship."

"Oh, it ain't no use talkin' to you!" Goodwin rose to his feet. "You'd
make out that a man 'u'd go to heaven for stickin' to his ship, even
if he done forty murders. I'm goin' to quit, an' that's all there is
to it."

Old Noble looked up at him where he stood. The old face, that had
been mild and indulgent, was hardened to an angry contempt. He was
old and strong, dexterous in all seamanlike arts, a being shaped for
good and evil both by half a century of seafaring, of wrong and
hardship, or danger and toil, of scant food and poor pay. Never in
his life had he held back from a task because it was dangerous or
difficult, nor sided with an officer against a man before the mast,
nor deserted a ship. His code was simple and brief, but it was of
iron.

"Well, quit, then," he said. "Quit like the Dutchmen! There's no one
will stop ye."

"They better not," menaced Goodwin angrily.

He had been shanghaied, of course, without chest or bag, without even
bedding, so that he had worked his way around the Horn in shoddy
clothes and flimsy oilskins obtained from the ship's slop-chest.
There was little that he had a mind to take ashore with him; it went
quickly into a small enough bundle. While he turned out his bunk, old
Noble sat watching him without moving, with judgment in his face, and
sorrow. He was looking on at the death of a good seaman.

"Say, Jim!" Goodwin was ready; he stood with his bundle in his hand,
his cap on his head. "You don't want to be a fool, now. I reckon we
can shake hands, anyhow."

He felt himself loath to leave the old man in anger; he had for him
both liking and respect. But Noble did not answer only continued for
some moments to look him in the face, unsoftened, stern and grieved,
then bent again above his sewing.

Goodwin withdrew the hand he had held out.

"Have it your own way," he said, and went forth from the forecastle,
leaving the old man, with the lamplight silvering his sparse hair, at
work upon the patched overalls. And, in that moment, not even the
vision of the girl and his hope of the future could save him from a
pang of sadness. It was as if he had, by his going, darkened a home.

Outside upon the deck he stayed to cast a glance about him. The big
ship, beautiful as a work of art in her lines and proportions, showed
vacant of life. A light glimmered from the galley door, where the
decrepit watchman slumbered at his ease. There was nothing to detain
him. The great yards, upon which he had fought down the sodden and
frozen canvas in gales off the Horn, spread over him. She was fine,
she was potent, with a claim upon a man's heart; and she was
notorious for a floating, hell upon the seas. It was her character;
she was famous for brutality to seamen, so that they deserted at the
first opportunity and forfeited their wages. And Noble would have him
loyal to her!

He swore at her shortly, and forced himself to cross the deck and
climb over the rail to the wharf. The conduct of Noble was sore in
his mind. But, as the earth of the shore gritted under his boots,
that trouble departed from him. The world, after all, was wider than
the decks of the Etna; and in it, an item in its wonder and
complexity, there lived and smiled the girl.

Miss James, who smiled so indescribably and asked so many questions
about seafaring in the way of civil conversation, would probably have
shown small interest in the adventures of a seaman in search of a
lodging ashore. She would have smiled, of course, with her own little
lift and fall of shy eyes, and been as intangible and desirable as
ever; but one could never tell her of carrying a small bundle of
underclothes from one obdurate door to another, unable to show money
in any convincing amount because one's capital was in a belt under
one's shirt. Othello told Desdemona of "antres vast and deserts
idle," not of skeptical landladies. Goodwin felt all this intensely
when, in the evening of the following day, having finally established
himself in a room, he beheld her again in the mission. He beheld her
first, indeed, as she entered the hall, he watching from the opposite
side of the street. He had no intention of going in if she were not
present. As it was, a swoop across the street and a little brisk
maneuvering secured him a place next to her.

He had been a little at a loss all day; it was years since he had
lived altogether apart from sailors and he had found himself lonely
and depressed; but the sight of her sufficed to restore him. She gave
him the welcome of a look, and a slow flush mounted on her face. The
missioner was already preparing to open the service, and conversation
was impossible. Nevertheless, as she turned over the pages of her
hymn-book, Goodwin bent toward her.

"Didn't I say I'd be along?" he whispered, and saw her cheek move
with her smile.

To be close to her, knowing her to be conscious of him, was in itself
a gladness; but Goodwin was impatient for the end of the service. It
was not his way to stand off and on before a thing he meant to do,
and he wanted more talk with her, to get within her guard, to touch
the girl who was screened behind the smile and dim sweetness and the
polite questions of Miss James. He sat frowning through the latter
part of the service, till the missioner, standing upright with
tight-shut eyes, gave the closing benediction. Then, compellingly, he
turned upon the girl.

"Say," he said, "let's get out o' this. I'd like to walk along with
you and talk. Come on!"

Miss James looked at him with startled eyes. He was insistent.

"Aw, come on," he pressed. "That preacher'll be here in a minute if
you don't, and we've had enough of him for one time. I tell you, I
want to talk to you."

He rose, and by sheer force of urgency made her rise likewise. He got
her as far as the door. "But" she began, hesitating there.

"Steady as ye go," bade Goodwin, and took her down the shallow steps
to the sidewalk. "Now, which way is it to be?" he demanded suddenly.

She did not reply for a couple of moments. The light that issued from
the hall showed her face as she stood and considered him doubtfully,
a little uncertain of what was happening. Even in that half-obscurity
of the long street, where she was seen as an attitude, a shape, she
made her effect of a quiet, tender beauty. Then, at last, she smiled
and turned and began to walk. Goodwin fell into step beside her, and
the confusion of voices within the hall died down behind them.

"I had to make you come," said Goodwin presently. "I just had to. An'
you don't want to be scared."

She glanced sideways at him, but said nothing.

"You ain't scared, are ye?" he asked.

"No," she replied.

The answer even the brevity of it fulfilled his understanding of her.
He nodded to himself.

"I said I wanted to talk to ye," he went on; "an' I do. I want to
talk to you a whole lot. But there ain't much I got to say. 'Ceptin',
maybe, one thing. I'd like to know what your first name is. Oh, I
ain't goin' to get fresh an' call you by it I reckon you know that.
But thinkin' of you all day an' half the night, like I do, 'Miss
James' don't come handy, ye see."

"Oh!" murmured the girl. It was plain that he had startled her a
little.

"My first name is Mary," she answered.

"Ah!" said Goodwin, and repeated it again and again under his breath.
"I might 'most ha' guessed it," he said. "It's well, it's a name that
fits ye like a coat o' paint, Miss James, A clean, straight name,
that is. Mary b'gosh, it was my mother's name."

"I'm glad you like it," said the girl, in her deep-toned, pleasant
voice. "You know, Mr. Goodwin, it was a bit queer the way you made me
come away from the hall."

"Ah, but that's not troublin' you," replied Goodwin quickly. "I
reckon you know what's wrong wi' me, Miss James. I'm not askin' you
for much yet; only to let me see you, when you go to that
mission-joint, and talk to ye sometimes."

They were at an intersection of streets, where a few shops yet shone
and surface-cars went by like blazing ships. There was a movement of
folk about them; yet, by reason of what had passed between them, it
seemed that they stood in a solitude of queer, strained feeling. The
girl halted in the light of a shop-window.

"I get my car here," she said.

Goodwin stopped, facing her. She looked up at the tense seriousness
of his young, set face, hard and strong, with the wind-tan coloring
it. She was kindly, eager to handle him tactfully, and possibly a
little warmed by his sincerity and admiration. To him she seemed the
sum of all that was desirable, pathetic, and stirring in womanhood.

"No," she said; "that's not much to ask. I'll be glad to meet you at
the mission, Mr. Goodwin, and maybe we can talk, too, sometimes. And
when you go away again, when your ship sails."

"Eh?" Goodwin's exclamation interrupted her. "Goin' away? Why, Miss
James, I ain't goin' away. That was all fixed up last night. I've
quit goin' to sea."

She stared at him, with parted lips.

"You don't understand," said Goodwin gently. "I knew, just as soon as
I seen you, that I wasn't going away no more. I went down an' fetched
my dunnage ashore right off."

She continued to stare. "Not going away?" she repeated.

Goodwin shook his head, smiling. He did not in the least understand
the embarrassment of a young woman who finds herself unexpectedly the
object of a romantic and undesired sacrifice.

A street-car jarred to a halt beside them. The girl made a queer
little gesture, as if in fear.

"My car!" she flustered indistinctly, and, turning suddenly, ran from
him towards it, taking refuge in its ordinariness against Goodwin and
all the strangeness with which he seemed to assail her.

He, smiling fatuously on the curb, saw it carry her off, swaying and
grinding. "Mary," he repeated. "Mary!"

Following his purpose, within the next few days he found himself
employment as one of a gang of riggers at work on a great German
four-masted barque which had been dismasted in a squall off Fire
Island. In the daytime he dealt with spars and gear, such stuff as he
knew familiarly, in the company of men like himself. Each evening
found him, washed and appareled, at the mission, furnishing a
decorous bass undertone to the hymns, looked on with approval by the
missioner and his helpers. Commonly he got himself a seat next to
Miss James; but he could not again contrive a walk with her along the
still street to the lighted corner where she ran to catch her car.
There seemed always to be a pair of voluminous elderly matrons in
attendance upon her, to daunt and chill him. She herself was
unchanged; her soft, beneficent radiance, her elusive, coy charm, all
her maddening quality of delicacy and shrinking beauty, uplifted him
still.

"Say," he always whispered, as he let himself down beside her, "are
we goin' to have a talk tonight?"

And she would shake her averted head hurriedly, and afterwards the
iron-clad matrons would close in on her and make her inaccessible.
And, in the end, he would go off to get a drink in a saloon before
going back to his room, baffled and discontented.

There were three evenings running on which she did not come to the
mission at all. On the fourth Goodwin was there before her. He looked
at her steadily as she came to her place.

"I want to talk to you to-night," he said, varying his formula, as
she sat down.

She gave him a swift, uncertain glance.

"Got to," he added gravely. "It's a case, an' I just got to."

"What about?" she asked, with a touch of resentment that was new in
her.

"I guess you know," he answered quietly, and hitched nearer to her
along the bench to make room for a new-comer who was thrusting in
beside him. He turned perfunctorily to see who it might be. It was
old Noble.

"Friends!" grated the voice of the missioner. "Let us begin by
singing hymn number seventy-nine: 'Pull for the shore, sailor; pull
for the shore!'"

The noise of the harmonium drowned the rustling of hymn-book pages.
Noble's elbow drove against Goodwin's.

"Found ye!" rumbled the old man. "Say, come on out where I can talk
to ye. We're sailin' in the mornin'."

"Hush!" whispered Goodwin. "I can't come out. What d'you want?"

The little congregation rose to its feet for the singing of the hymn.
Old Noble, rising with them, leaned forward and peered past Goodwin
at the girl. His keen old face inspected her inscrutably for a while.

"That's her, I reckon," he said to Goodwin in a windy whisper. "Well,
I'm not sayin' nothin'. Come on out."

"I can't, I tell ye," breathed Goodwin. "Don't you go startin'
anything here, now! Say what ye got to say, an' be done with it."

Old Noble scowled. About him the simple hymn rose and fell in its
measured cadences. Among the honest folk who sang it there was none
more venerable and seemly than he. His head was white with the sober
snow of years; by contrast with his elderly gravity, the young
vividness and force of Goodwin seemed violent and crude.

"I won't start nothin'," whispered Noble harshly. "Don't be afeared.
I bin lookin' for ye, Dan; I want ye to have a chanst. We're sailin'
in the mornin', an', Dan, we're short-handed three hands short, we
are!"

His words came and went under cover of the hymn.

"Men won't ship aboard of her; she's got a bad name," the whisper
continued. "She's full o' Dutchmen an' Dagoes again. It's goin' to be
the hell of a passage an' the Horn in August, too. Come on an' stand
yer share of it, Dan."

Goodwin glared down indignantly at the old rusty-red face beside him.

"You're crazy," he said shortly.

"Ye ain't comin'?"

For answer Goodwin only shrugged. It sufficed. With no further word
Noble turned away and walked forth on heavy feet from the hall. There
followed him to the street, as if in derision, the refrain of that
landsman's hymn: "Leave the poor old stranded wreck, and pull for the
shore!"

"Now!" said Goodwin, when at last the missioner had closed the
service with his blessing.

The girl was nervous; plainly, she would have been glad to refuse.
But Goodwin was in earnest, and, unwillingly enough, she surrendered
to the compulsion of his will and went out with him. Outside upon the
sidewalk she spoke angrily.

"I don't like the way you act," she said, and her voice had tears in
it. "You think a person's got."

Goodwin interrupted. "I don't think nothin'," he said. "I got to find
out. An' I can't find out while we're hustlin' to the corner. Come
down towards the docks. You're all right with me; an' I got to find
out."

He did not even touch her arm, but she went with him.

"Find out what?" she asked uncertainly, as they crossed the street.

"Come on," he answered. "We'll talk by an' by."

He took her down a dark side way which led them to the water-front.
Wharves where work was going on roared and shone. The masts and spars
of ships rose stark against the sky. Beyond, the river was dotted
with lights against the luminous horizon of Manhattan. He slackened
his pace. At his side the silent girl trembled and sulked.

"Kid," said Goodwin, "there's one of us two that hasn't made good.
Which is it?"

A jib-boom slanted across a wall over their heads. They were alone
among sleeping ships.

"I don't know what you mean," answered the girl. "You say you've got
to talk to me, and you act--." She stopped.

"You don't know what I mean?" repeated Goodwin. "I'll have to tell
you, then."

They had come to a pause under the jib-boom of the silent ship. She
waited for him to go on, servile to the still mastery of his mien.

"That night the night I come to the mission for the first time," went
on Goodwin, "when you loaned me the book, I quit my ship to keep
close to you. That ain't nothin'; the ship was a terror, anyway. But
I seen you, and, girl, I couldn't get you out o' my head. You was all
right the next night, when I went along with you to your car; it
wasn't just because the missionary feller set you at me, neither.
What's gone wrong with me since?"

He asked the question mildly, with a tone of gentle and reasonable
inquiry.

"I haven't said anything was wrong with you," Answered the girl
sullenly. "I don't have to answer your questions, anyway."

"I reckon you do these questions," said Goodwin. "What is it, now? Am
I different to what you reckoned I was, or what? I never set up to be
anythin' but just plain man. Tell me what I'm shy of. Are you scared
you'll have to to marry me?"

"Oh!" The girl shrank away from him.

"That's it, is it? Well, you don't need to be." His voice was bitter.
"I'd never ha' dared to ask you before, an' now I wouldn't, anyway.
See? But I know, all the same, if I wasn't just a blasted sailor if I
was a storekeeper or a rich man I c'd have ye. Why, damme, I c'd have
ye anyway!"

She had backed before him; and now she was against the wall, uttering
a small moan of protest.

"I could," he repeated. "You know it. I'd only to go chasin' you, an'
in the end you'd give in. You're pretty; you got a shine on you that
fools a man. But you're a quitter a quitter! See? An' now you can
come away from that wall an' I'll see you back on the street."

He was very lofty and erect in the meager light, rather a superb
figure, if the girl had had eyes for it. But she, to all seeming, was
dazed. He went in silence at her side till they reached the street
and saw that the open door of the mission still showed lights.

"There ye are," said Goodwin, halting.

The girl hesitated, looking back and forth. It was wonderful how her
suggestion of soft beauty persisted. She was abashed, stricken,
humiliated upon the dark street; and still she was lovely. She moved
away and paused.

"Good night!" said her faintly ringing voice, and she passed towards
the mission.

"Yes, it's me!" said Goodwin, answering the dumb surprise of old
Noble as he entered the fo'c'sle of the Etna. "An' you want to shut
your head. See?"



VI

THE BREADWINNER

The noonday bivouac was in a shady place nigh-hand the road, where a
group of solemn trees made a shadow on the dusty grass. It was a day
of robust heat; the sky arched cloudless over Sussex, and the road
was soft with white dust that rose like smoke under the feet. Trotter
no sooner saw the place than he called a halt and dropped his bundle.
The Signor smiled lividly and followed suit; Bill, the dog, lay down
forthwith and panted.

"Look at 'im!" said Trotter. "Just look at 'im, will yer! 'E ain't
carried no bundle; 'e ain't got to unpack no grub. And there 'e lies,
for us to wait on 'im."

"Where ees da beer?" demanded the Signor, who had the immediate mind.

The word drew Trotter from his wrongs, and together the men untied
the shabby bundles and set forth their food.

They made a queer picture in that quiet place of English green.
Trotter still wore tights, with hobnailed boots to walk in and a
rusty billycock hat for shelter to his head. He somewhat clung to
this garb, though his tumbling days were over. One had only to look
at his bloated, pouchy face to see how drink and sloth had fouled his
joints and slacked his muscles. Never again could he spread the
drugget in a rustic village street and strut about it on his hands
for the edification of a rustic audience. But the uniform he still
wore; he seemed to think it gave him some claim to indulgent notice.
The Signor, in his own way, was not less in contrast with his
background. His lean, predatory face and capacious smile went fitly
with the shabby frock coat and slouched hat he affected. He carried a
fiddle under his arm, but the most he could do was strum on it with
his thumb. Together, they made a couple that anyone would look twice
at, and no one care to meet in a lonely place.

Bill, the dog, shared none of their picturesque quality. An uglier
dog never went footsore. A dozen breeds cropped out here and there on
his hardy body; his coat was distantly suggestive of a collie; his
tail of a terrier. But something of width between the patient eyes
and bluntness in the scarred muzzle spoke to a tough and hardy
ancestor in his discreditable pedigree, as though a lady of his house
had once gone away with a bulldog. His part in the company was to do
tricks outside beerhouses. When the Signor's strumming had gathered a
little crowd, Trotter would introduce Bill.

"Lydies and gents all," he would say, "with yore kind permission, I
will now introduce to yer the world-famous wolf 'ound Boris, late of
the Barnum menagerie in New York. 'E will commence 'is exhibition of
animal intelligence by waltzin' to the strines of Yankee Doodle on
the vi'lin."

Then the Signor would strum on two strings of the fiddle, smiling the
while a smile that no woman should see, and Bill would waltz
laboriously on his hind legs. After that he would walk on his front
legs, throw somersaults, find a hidden handkerchief, and so on. And
between each piece of clowning, he would go round with Trotter's hat
to collect coppers. Bill was an honest dog, and a fairly big one as
well, and when a man tried to ignore the hat, he had a way of drawing
back his lips from his splendid teeth which by itself was frequently
worth as much to the treasury as all his other tricks put together.
But the truth of it was, it was a feeble show, a scanty, pitiful
show; and only the gross truculence of Trotter and the venomous
litheness of the Signor withheld the average yokel from saying so
flatly.

But it gave them enough to live on and drink on. At any rate, Trotter
grew fat and the Signor grew thinner. Bill depended on what they had
left when they were satisfied; it was little enough. He begged at
cottages on his own account, sometimes; sitting up in the attitude of
mendicancy till something was thrown to him. Occasionally, too, he
stole fowls or raided a butcher's shop. Then Trotter and the Signor
would disown him vociferously to the bereaved one, and hasten on to
come up with him before he had eaten it all. He preferred being
beaten to going hungry, so they never caught him till he had fed
full. But what troubled him most was the tramping, the long dusty
stages afoot in country where the unsociable villages lay remote from
each other, and the roads were hot and long. A man can outwalk any
other animal. After thirty miles, a horse is nowhere and the man is
still going, but even fifteen miles leaves the ordinary dog limp and
sorry. And then, when every bone in him was aching, a wretched
village might poke up at an elbow of the way, and there would be
dancing to do and his whole fatuous repertoire to accomplish, while
his legs were soft under him with weariness.

Trotter took his heavy boots off; he threw one at Bill.

It was a pleasant spot. Where they sat, in a bay of shade, they could
see a far reach of rich land, bright in the sunshine and dotted with
wood, stretching back to where the high shoulder of the downs shut
out the sea.

The two men ate in much contentment, passing the bottle to and fro.

Bill waited for them to have done and fling him his share. In common
with all Bohemians, he liked regular meals.

"That dog's goin' silly," said Trotter, looking at him where he lay.

"Oh, him!" said the Signor.

"He's bin loafin' a furlong be'ind all the mornin'," said Trotter.
"Yer know if he was to get lazy, it 'ud be a poor lookout for us.
He's bin spoilt, that dog 'as spoilt with indulgence. Soon as we stop
for a spell oh, he plops down on 'is belly and 'angs on for us to
chuck 'im a bit of grub. Might be a man by the ways of 'im, 'stead of
a dog. Now I don't 'old with spoilin' dogs."

"Pass da beer," requested the Signor.

Bill looked up with concern, for Trotter was filling his pipe; the
meal was at an end.

"Yus, yer can look," snarled Trotter. "You'll wait, you will."

He began to pack up the bread and meat again in the towel where it
belonged.

"Think you've got yer rights, don't yer?" he growled, as he swept the
fragments together. "No dog comes them games on me. Hey, get out, ye
brute!"

Bill had walked over and was now helping himself to the food that lay
between Trotter's very hands.

Trotter clenched a bulging red fist and hauled off to knock him away.
But Bill had some remainder of the skill, as well as the ferocity, of
the fighting dog in him. He snapped sideways in a purposeful silence,
met the swinging fist adroitly, and sank his fine teeth cruelly in
the fat wrist.

"Hey! Signor, Signor!" howled Trotter. "Kick 'im orf, can't yer! Ow,
o-o-ow!"

Bill let him go as the Signor approached, but the kick that was meant
for him spent itself in the air. Again he snapped, with that sideways
striking action of the big bony head, and the Signor shrieked like a
woman and sprang away.

Bill watched the pair of them for half a minute, as they took refuge
among the trees, and both saw the glint of his strong teeth as he
stared after them. Then he finished the food at his ease, while they
cursed and whimpered from a distance.

"'E's mad," moaned Trotter. "'Es 'ad a stroke. An' we'll get
hydrophobia from 'im as like as not."

He nursed his bitten wrist tenderly.

"Look at my laig!" babbled the Signor. "It is a sacred bite, an'
all-a da trouser tore. What da hell you fool wid da dog for, you big
fool?"

"'E was pinchin' the grub," growled Trotter. "E's mad. Look at 'im,
lyin' down on my coat. 'Ere, Bill! Goo' dog, then. Good ole feller!"

Bill took no notice of the blandishments of Trotter, but presently he
rose and strolled off to where a little pond stood in the corner of a
field.

"'E's drinkin'," reported Trotter, who had stolen from cover to make
observations. "So 'e can't be mad. Mad dogs won't look at water. Go
into fits if they sees it. 'Ere, Signor, let's make a grab for those
bundles before 'e gets back."

Bill rejoined them while they were yet stuffing their shabby
possessions together.

The Signor moved behind Trotter and Trotter picked up a boot. But
Bill was calm and peaceful again. He lay down in the grass and wagged
his tail cheerfully.

"Bill, ole feller," said Trotter, in tones of conciliation, and Bill
wagged again.

"'Ell, I can't make nothing of it," confessed Trotter blankly. "Must
have gone sort o' temp'ry insane, like the sooicides. But well, we'll
be even with 'im before all's over."

And the lean Signor's sidelong look at the dog was full of menace.

They reached another village before dark, a village with a good
prosperous alehouse, and here Bill showed quite his old form. He
waltzed, he threw somersaults, he found handkerchiefs, he carried the
hat; his docility was all that Trotter and the Signor could have
asked. They cleared one and sevenpence out of his tricks, and would
have stayed to drink it; but Bill walked calmly on up the road and
barely gave them time enough to buy food.

They cursed him lavishly; the Signor raved in a hot frenzy; but they
dared not lose him. The dog led them at an easy pace and they labored
after him furiously, while a great pale moon mounted in the sky and
the soft night deepened over the fields.

He let them down at last at an end of grass where a few of last
year's straw ricks afforded lodging for the night. Both the men were
tired enough to be glad of the respite and they sank down in the
shadow of a rick with little talk.

"It gets me," Trotter said. "The dog's a danger. 'E ought to be
drownded."

The Signor snarled. "An' us?" he demanded. "We go to work, eh? You
pick da grass-a to make-a da hay and me I drive-a da cart, eh? Oh,
Trottair, you fool!"

"'Ere, let's 'ave some grub and stow the jaw for a bit," said
Trotter.

He had bread and meat, bought in a hurry at the tail of the village
while Bill receded down the road.

As soon as he laid it bare, Bill growled.

"T'row heem some, queeck," cried the Signor.

Bill caught the loaf and settled down to it with an appetite. Trotter
stared at him with a gape.

"Well, blow me!" he said. "'Ave we come to feedin' the bloomin' dog
before we feeds ourselves? 'As the beggar struck for that? I s'pose
'e'll be wantin' wages next."

"Oh, shutta da gab!" snapped the Signor.

"That's all very well," retorted Trotter. "But I'm an Englishman, I
am. You're only a furriner; you're used to bein' put upon. But
I'm--."

Bill growled again and rose to his feet. Trotter tossed him a piece
of meat.

All that was long ago. Now if you stray through the South of England
during the months between May and October, you may yet meet Bill and
his companions. Trotter still wears tights, but he is thinner and
much more wholesome to see; but the Signor has added a kind of shiny
servility to his courtly Italian manner.

Bill is sleek and fat.

And now, when they come to rest at noonday, you will see, if you
watch them, that before Trotter takes his boots off he feeds the dog.
And the Signor fetches him water.



VII

"PLAIN GERMAN"

Beyond the arcaded side-walks, whose square-pillared arches stand
before the house-fronts like cloisters, the streets of Thun were
channels 'of standing sunlight, radiating heat from every
cobblestone. Herr Haase, black-coated and white-waistcoated as for a
festival, his large blond face damp and distressful, came panting
into the hotel with the manner of an exhausted swimmer climbing
ashore. In one tightly-gloved hand he bore a large and bulging linen
envelope.

"Pfui!" He puffed, and tucked the envelope under one arm in order to
take off his green felt hat and mop himself. "Aber what a heat, what
a heat!"

The brass-buttoned hotel porter, a-sprawl in a wicker chair in the
hall, lowered his newspaper and looked up over his silver spectacles.
He was comfortably unbuttoned here and there, and had omitted to
shave that morning, for this was July, 1916, and since the war had
turned Switzerland's tourists into Europe's cannon-fodder, he had run
somewhat to seed.

"Yes, it is warm," he agreed, without interest, and yawned. "You have
come to see" he jerked his head towards the white staircase and its
strip of red carpet "to see him not? He is up there. But what do you
think of the news this morning?"

Herr Haase was running, his handkerchief round the inside of his
collar. "To see him! I have come to see the Herr Baron von
Steinlach," he retorted, crossly. "And what news are you talking
about now?" He continued to pant and wipe while the porter read from
his copy of the Bund, the German official communique of the previous
day's fighting on the Somme.

"I don't like it," said the porter, when he had finished. "It looks
as if we were losing ground. Those English."

Herr Haase pocketed his handkerchief and took the large envelope in
his hand again. He was a bulky, middle-aged man, one of whose
professional qualifications it was that he looked and sounded
commonplace, the type of citizen who is the patron of beer-gardens,
wars of aggression, and the easily remembered catchwords which are
the whole political creed of his kind. His appearance was the bushel
under which his secret light burned profitably; it had indicated him
for his employment as a naturalized citizen of Switzerland and the
tenant of the pretty villa on the hill above Thun, whence he drove
his discreet and complicated traffic in those intangible wares whose
market is the Foreign Office in Berlin.

He interrupted curtly. "Don't talk to me about the English!" he
puffed. "Gott strafe England!" He stopped. The porter was paid by the
same hand as himself. The hall was empty save for themselves, and
there was no need to waste good acting on a mere stage-hand in the
piece.

"The English," he said, "are going to have a surprise."

"Eh?" The slovenly man in the chair gaped up at him stupidly. Herr
Haase added to his words the emphasis of a nod and walked on to the
stairs.

In the corridor above, a row of white-painted bedroom doors had each
its number. Beside one of them a tall young man was sunk spinelessly
in a chair, relaxed to the still warmth of the day. He made to rise
as Herr Haase approached, swelling for an instant to a drilled and
soldierly stature, but, recognizing him, sank back again.

"He's in there," he said languidly. "Knock for yourself."

"Schlapschwanz!" remarked Herr Haase indignantly, and rapped upon the
door. A voice within answered indistinctly. Herr Haase, removing his
hat, opened the door and entered.

The room was a large one, an hotel bedroom converted into a
sitting-room, with tall French windows opening to a little veranda,
and a view across the lime-trees of the garden to the blinding silver
of the lake of Thun and the eternal snow-fields of the Bernese
Oberland. Beside the window and before a little spindle-legged
writing-table a man sat. He turned his head as Herr Haase entered.

"Ach, der gute Haase," he exclaimed.

Herr Haase brought his patent leather heels together with a click and
bowed like a T-square.

"Excellenz!" he said, in a strange, loud voice, rather like a man in
a trance. "Your Excellency's papers, received by the train arriving
from Bern at eleven-thirty-five."

The other smiled, raising to him a pink and elderly face, with a
clipped white moustache and heavy tufted brows under which the faint
blue eyes were steady and ironic. He was a large man, great in the
frame and massive; his movements had a sure, unhurried deliberation;
and authority, the custom and habit of power, clad him like a
garment. Years and the moving forces of life had polished him as
running water polishes a stone. The Baron von Steinlach showed to
Herr Haase a countenance supple as a hand and formidable as a fist.

"Thank you, my good Haase," he said, in his strong deliberate German.
"You look hot. This sun, eh? Poor fellow!"

But he did not bid him sit down. Instead, he turned to the linen
envelope, opened it, and shook out upon the table its freight of
lesser envelopes, typed papers, and newspaper-clippings.
Deliberately, but yet with a certain discrimination and efficiency,
he began to read them. Herr Haase, whose new patent leather boots
felt red-hot to his feet, whose shirt was sticking to his back,
whose collar was melting, watched him expressionlessly.

"There is a cloud of dust coming along the lake road," said the Baron
presently, glancing through the window. "That should be Captain von
Wetten in his automobile. We will see what he has to tell us, Haase."

"At your orders, Excellency," deferred Herr Haase.

"Because" he touched one of the papers before him "this news, Haase,
is not good. It is not good. And this discovery here, if it be all
that is claimed for it, should work miracles."

He glanced up at Herr Haase and smiled again. "Not that I think
miracles can ever be worked by machinery," he added.

It was ten minutes after this that the column of dust on the lake
road delivered its core and cause in the shape of a tall man, who
knocked once at the door and strode in without waiting for an answer.

"Ah, my dear Von Wetten," said the Baron pleasantly. "It is hot, eh?"

"An oven," replied Von Wetten curtly. "This place is an oven. And the
dust, ach!"

The elder man made a gesture of sympathy. "Poor fellow!" he said.
"Sit down; sit down. Haase, that chair!"

And Herr Haase, who controlled a hundred and twelve subordinates, who
was a Swiss citizen and a trusted secret agent, brought the chair and
placed it civilly, neither expecting nor receiving thanks.

The new-comer was perhaps twenty-eight years of age, tall, large in
the chest and little in the loins, with a narrow, neatly-chiseled
face which fell naturally to a chill and glassy composure. "Officer"
was written on him as clear as a brand; his very quiet clothes sat on
his drilled and ingrained formality of posture and bearing as
noticeably as a mask and domino; he needed a uniform to make him
inconspicuous. He picked up his dangling monocle, screwed it into his
eye, and sat back.

"And now?" inquired the Baron agreeably, "and now, my dear Von
Wetten, what have you to tell us?"

"Well, Excellenz" Captain von Wetten hesitated. "As a matter of fact,
I've arranged for you to see the thing yourself this afternoon."

The Baron said nothing merely waited, large and still against the
light of the window which shone on the faces of the other two.

Captain von Wetten shifted in his chair awkwardly. "At five,
Excellenz," he added; "it'll be cooler then. You see, Herr Baron,
it's not the matter of the machine I've seen that all right; it's the
man."

"So!" The explanation, which explained nothing to Herr Haase, seemed
to satisfy the Baron. "The man, eh? But you say you have seen the
machine. It works?"

"It worked all right this morning," replied Von Wetten. "I took my
own explosives with me, as you know some French and English
rifle-cartridges and an assortment of samples from gun charges and
marine mines. I planted some in the garden; the place was all pitted
already with little craters from his experiments; and some,
especially the mine stuff, I threw into the lake. The garden's on the
edge of the lake, you know. Well, he got out his machine thing like a
photographic camera, rather, on a tripod turned it this way and that
until it pointed to my explosives, and pop! off they went like a lot
of fireworks. Pretty neat, I thought."

"Ah!" The Baron's elbow was on his desk and his head rested in his
hand. "Then it is what that Italian fellow said he had discovered in
1914. 'Ultra-red rays,' he called them. What was his name, now?"

"Never heard of him," said Von Wetten.

From the background where Herr Haase stood among the other furniture
came a cough. "Oliver," suggested Herr Haase mildly.

The Baron jerked a look at him. "No, not Oliver," he said. "Ulivi
that was it; Ulivi! I remember at the time we were interested,
because, if the fellow could do what he claimed." He broke off. "Tell
me," he demanded of Von Wetten. "You are a soldier; I am only a
diplomat. What would this machine mean in war in this war, for
instance? Supposing you were in command upon a sector of the front;
that in the trenches opposite you were the English; and you had this
machine? What would be the result?"

"Well!" Von Wetten deliberated. "Pretty bad for the English, I should
think," he decided.

"But how, man how?" persisted the Baron. "In what way would it be bad
for them?"

Von Wetten made an effort; he was not employed for his imagination.
"Why," he hesitated, "because I suppose the cartridges would blow up
in the men's pouches and in the machine-gun belts; and then the
trench-mortar ammunition and the hand grenades; well, everything
explosive would simply explode! And then we'd go over to what was
left of them, and it would be finished."

He stopped abruptly as the vision grew clearer. "Aber," he began
excitedly.

The old Baron lifted a hand and quelled him.

"The machine you saw this morning, which you tested, will do all
this?" he insisted.

Von Wetten was staring at the Baron. Upon the question he let his
monocle fall and seemed to consider. "I, I don't see why not," he
replied.

The Baron nodded thrice, very slowly. Then he glanced up at Herr
Haase. "Then miracles are worked by machinery, after all," he said.
Then he turned again to Von Wetten.

"Well?" he said. "And the man? We are forgetting the man; I think we
generally do, we Germans. What is the difficulty about the man?"

Von Wetten shrugged. "The difficulty is that he won't name his
price," he answered. "Don't understand him! Queer, shambling sort of
fellow, all hair and eyes, with the scar of an old cut, or something,
across one side of his face. Keeps looking at you as if he hated you!
Showed me the machine readily enough; consented to every test even
offered to let me take my stuff to the other side of the lake, three
miles away, and explode it at that distance. But when it came to
terms, all he'd do was to look the other way and mumble."

"What did you offer him?" demanded the Baron.

"My orders, Your Excellency," answered Captain von Wetten formally,
"were to agree to his price, but not to attempt negotiations in the
event of difficulty over the terms. That was reserved for Your
Excellency."

"H'm!" The Baron nodded. "Quite right," he approved. "Quite right;
there is something in this. Men have their price, but sometimes they
have to be paid in a curious currency. By the way, how much money
have we?"

Herr Haase, a mere living ache inhabiting the background, replied.

"I am instructed, Excellency, that my cheque will be honored at sight
here for a million marks," he answered, in the loud hypnotized voice
of the drill-ground. "But there is, of course, no limit."

The Baron gave him an approving nod. "No limit," he said. "That is
the only way to do things no limit, in money or anything else! Well,
Haase can bring the car round at what time, Von Wetten?"

"Twenty minutes to five!" Von Wetten threw the words over his
shoulder.

"And I shall lunch up here; it's cooler. You'd better lunch with me,
and we can talk. Send up a waiter as you go, my good Haase."

Herr Haase bowed, but clicked only faintly. "Zu Befehl, Excellenz,"
he replied, and withdrew.

In the hall below he sank into a chair, groaned and fumbled at the
buttons of his boots. He was wearing them for the first time, and
they fitted him as though they had been shrunk on to him. The porter,
his waistcoat gaping, came shambling over to him.

"You were saying," began the porter, "that the English."

Herr Haase boiled over. "Zum Teufel mit den Englandern und mit Dir,
Schafskopf!" he roared, tearing at the buttons. "Send up a waiter to
the Herr Baron and call me a cab to go home in!"

It was in a sunlight tempered as by a foreboding of sunset, when the
surface of the lake was ribbed like sea sand with the first
breathings of the evening breeze, that Herr Haase, riding proudly in
the back seat of honor, brought the motor-car to the hotel. He had
changed his garb of ceremony and servitude; he wore grey now, one of
those stomach-exposing, large-tailed coats which lend even to the
straightest man the appearance of being bandy-legged; and upon his
feet were a pair of tried and proven cloth boots.

The porter, his waistcoat buttoned for the occasion, carried out a
leather suit-case and placed it in the car, then stood aside, holding
open the door, as the Baron and Von Wetten appeared from the hall.
Von Wetten, true to his manner, saw neither Herr Haase's bow nor the
porter's lifted cap; to him, salutations and civilities came like the
air he breathed, and were as little acknowledged. The Baron gave to
Herr Haase the compliment of a glance that took in the grey coat and
the cloth boots, and the ghost of an ironic, not unkindly smile.

"Der gute Haase," he murmured, and then, as though in absence of
mind, "Poor fellow, poor fellow!"

His foot was upon the step of the car when he saw the leather
suit-case within. He paused in the act of entering.

"What is this baggage?" he inquired.

Von Wetten craned forward to look. "Oh, that! I wanted you to see the
machine at work, Excellenz, so I'm bringing a few cartridges and
things."

His Excellency withdrew his foot and stepped back. "Explosives, eh?"
He made a half-humorous grimace of distaste. "Haase, lift that bag
out carefully, man! and carry it in front with you. And tell the
chauffeur to drive cautiously!"

Their destination was to the eastward of the little town, where the
gardens of the villas trail their willow-fringes in the water. Among
them, a varnished yellow chalet lifted its tiers of glassed-in
galleries among the heavy green of fir-trees; its door, close beside
the road, was guarded by a gate of iron bars. The big car slid to a
standstill beside it with a scrape of tires in the dust.

"A moment," said the old baron, as Herr Haase lifted his hand to the
iron bell-pull that hung beside the gate. "Who are we? What names
have you given, Von Wetten? Schmidt and Meyer or something more
fanciful?"

"Much more fanciful, Excellenz." Von Wetten allowed himself a smile.
"I am Herr Wetten; Your Excellency is Herr Steinlach. It could not be
simpler."

The Baron laughed quietly. "Very good, indeed," he agreed. "And
Haase? You did not think of him? Well, the good Haase, for the time
being, shall be the Herr von Haase. Eh, Haase?"

"Zu Befehl, Excellenz," deferred Herr Haase.

The iron bell-pull squealed in its dry guides; somewhere within the
recesses of the house a sleeping bell woke and jangled. Silence
followed. The three of them waited upon the road in the slant of the
sunshine, aware of the odor of hot dust, trees, and water. Herr Haase
stood, in the contented torpor of service and obedience, holding the
heavy suit-case to one side of the gate; to the other, the Baron and
Von Wetten stood together. Von Wetten, with something of rigidity
even in his ease and insouciance, stared idly at the windows through
which, as through stagnant eyes, the silent house seemed to be
inspecting them; the Baron, with his hands joined behind him, was
gazing through the gate at the unresponsive yellow door. His pink,
strong face had fallen vague and mild; he seemed to dream in the
sunlight upon the threshold of his enterprise. All of him that was
formidable and potent was withdrawn from the surface, sucked in, and
concentrated in the inner centers of his mind and spirit.

There sounded within the door the noise of footsteps; a bolt clashed,
and there came out to the gate a young woman with a key in her hand.
The Baron lifted his head and looked at her, and she stopped, as
though brought up short by the impact of his gaze. She was a small
creature, not more than twenty-two or twenty-three years of age, as
fresh and pretty as apple-blossom. But it was more than shyness that
narrowed her German-blue eyes as she stood behind the bars, looking
at the three men.

Von Wetten, tall, comely, stepped forward.

"Good afternoon, gnadige Frau. We have an appointment with your
husband for this hour. Let me present Herr Steinlach Herr von Haase."

The two bowed at her; she inspected each in turn, still with that
narrow-eyed reserve.

"Yes," she said then, in a small tinkle of a voice. "My husband is
expecting you."

She unlocked the gate; the key resisted her, and she had to take both
hands to it, flushing with the effort of wrenching it over. They
followed her into the house, along an echoing corridor, to a front
room whose windows framed a dazzling great panorama of wide water,
steep blue mountain, and shining snow-slopes. Herr Haase, coming last
with the suitcase, saw around the Baron's large shoulders how she
flitted across and called into the balcony: "Egon, the Herren are
here!" Then, without glancing at them again, she passed them and
disappeared.

Herr Haase's wrist was aching with his burden. Gently, and with
precaution against noise, he stooped, and let the suit-case down upon
the floor. So that he did not see the entry at that moment of the man
who came from the balcony, walking noiselessly upon rubber-soled
tennis-shoes. He heard Von Wetten's "Good afternoon, Herr
Bettermann," and straightened up quickly to be introduced.

He found himself taking the hand it lay in his an instant as
lifelessly as a glove of a young man whose eyes, over-large in a
tragically thin face and under a chrysanthemum shock of hair, were at
once timid and angry. He was coatless, as though he had come fresh
from some work, and under his blue shirt his shoulders showed
angular. But what was most noticeable about him, when he lifted his
face to the light, was the scar of which Von Wetten had spoken a red
and jagged trace of some ugly wound, running from the inner corner of
the right eye to the edge of the jaw. He murmured some inaudible
acknowledgment of Herr Haase's scrupulously correct greeting.

Then, as actually as though an arm of flesh and blood had thrust him
back. Herr Haase was brushed aside. It was as if the Baron von
Steinlach, choosing his moment, released his power of personality
upon the scene as a man lets go his held breath. "A wonderful view
you have here, Herr Bettermann," was all he said. The young man
turned to him to reply; it was as though their opposite purposes and
wills crossed and clashed like engaged swords. Herr Haase, and even
the salient and insistent presence of Von Wetten, thinned and became
vague ghostly, ineffectual natives of the background in the stark
light of the reality of that encounter.

There were some sentences, mere feigning, upon that radiant
perspective which the wide windows framed.

Then: "My friend and associate, Herr Wetten here, has asked me to
look into this matter," said the Baron. His voice was silk, the silk
"that holds fast where a steel chain snaps."

"First, to confirm his impressions of the the apparatus; second" the
subtle faint-blue eyes of the old man and the dark suspicious eyes of
the young man met and held each other "and second, the question, the
minor question, of the price. However" his lips, under the clipped,
white moustache, widened in a smile without mirth "that need not take
us long, since the price, you see, is not really a question at all."

The haggard young man heard him with no change in that painful
intensity of his.

"Isn't it?" he said shortly. "We'll see! But first, I suppose, you
want to see the thing at work. I have here cordite, gelignite,
trinitrotoluol," but his hare's eyes fell on the suit-case, "perhaps
you have brought your own stuff?"

"Yes," said the Baron; "I have brought my own stuff."

The garden of the villa was a plot of land reaching down to a parapet
lapped by the still stone-blue waters of the lake. Wooden steps led
down to it from the balcony; Herr Haase, descending them last with
the suit-case, paused an instant to shift his burden from one hand to
the other, and had time to survey the place the ruins of a lawn,
pitted like the face of a small-pox patient with small holes, where
the raw clay showed through the unkempt grass the "craters" of which
Captain von Wetten had spoken. Tall fir-trees, the weed of
Switzerland, bounded the garden on either hand, shutting it in as
effectually as a wall. Out upon the blue-and-silver floor of the lake
a male human being rowed a female of his species in a skiff; and near
the parapet something was hooded under a black cloth, such as
photographers use, beneath whose skirts there showed the feet of a
tripod.

Herr Bettermann, the young man with the scar, walked across to it. At
first glimpse, it had drawn all their eyes; each felt that here,
properly and decently screened, was the core of the affair. It was
right that it should be covered up and revealed only at the due
moment; yet Bettermann went to it and jerked the black cloth off,
raping the mystery of the thing as crudely as a Prussian in Belgium.

"Here it is," he said curtly. "Put your stuff where you like."

The cloth removed disclosed a contrivance like two roughly cubical
boxes, fitted one above the other, the upper projecting a little
beyond the lower, and mounted on the apex of the tripod. A third box,
evidently, by the terminals which projected from its cover, the
container of a storage battery, lay between the feet of the tripod,
and wires linked it with the apparatus above. Beside the tripod lay a
small black bag such as doctors are wont to carry.

Von Wetten took a key from his pocket and threw it on the ground.
"Unlock that bag," he said to Herr Haase, and turned towards the
Baron and his host.

Herr Haase picked up the key, unlocked the suitcase, and stood ready
for further orders. The Baron was standing with Bettermann by the
tripod; the latter was talking and detaching some piece of mechanism
within the apparatus. His voice came clearly across to Herr Haase.

"Two blades," he was saying, "and one varies their angle with this.
The sharper the angle, the greater the range of the ray and the
shorter the effective arc. But, of course, this machine is only a
model."

"Quite so," acquiesced the Baron.

"These" his hand emerged from the upper box "are the blades."

He withdrew from the apparatus a contrivance like a pair of brief
tongs, of which the shanks were stout wires and the spatulates were
oblongs of thin, whitish metal like aluminum, some three inches long
by two wide.

"The essence of the whole thing," he said. "You see, they are hinged;
one sets them wider or closer according to the range and the arc one
requires. These plates they are removable. I paint the compound on
them, and switch the current on through this battery."

"Ah, yes," agreed the Baron dreamily. "The compound that has to be
painted on."

The thin face of the inventor turned upon him; the great eyes
smoldered. "Yes," was the answer; "yes. I, I paint it on enough for
three or four demonstrations, and then I throw the rest into the
lake. So my secret is safe, you see."

The Baron met his eyes with the profound ironic calm of his own.
"Safe, I am sure," he replied. "The safer the better. And now, where
would you prefer us to arrange our explosives?"

The other shrugged his shoulders. "Where you like," he said, bending
to the little black hand-bag. "Lay them on the ground or bury them,
or throw them int

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