When he reached the cabin, Saxon found Steele still awake. The gray
advance-light of dawn beyond the eastern ridges had grown rosy, and
the rosiness had brightened into the blue of living day when an early
teamster, passing along the turnpike, saw two men garbed in what he
would have called "full-dress suits," still sitting over their cigars
on the verandah of the hill shack. A losing love either expels a man
into the outer sourness of resentment, or graduates him into a
friendship that needs no further testing. Steele was not the type that
goes into an embittered exile. His face had become somewhat fixed as
he listened, but there had been no surprise. He had known already,
and, when the story was ended, he was an ally.
"There are two courses open to you," he said, when he rose at last
from his seat, "the plan you have of going to South America, and the
one I suggested of facing forward and leaving the past behind. If you
do the first, whether or not you are the man they want, the
circumstantial case is strong. You know too little of your past to
defend yourself, and you are placing yourself in the enemy's hands.
The result will probably be against you with equal certainty whether
innocent or guilty."
"Letting things lie," demurred Saxon, "solves nothing."
"Why solve them?" Steele paused at his door. "It would seem to me that
with her in your life you would be safe against forgetting your
present at all events--and that present is enough."
The summer was drawing to its close while Saxon still wavered. Unless
he faced the charge that seemed impending near the equator, he must
always stand, before himself at least, convicted. Yet, Duska was
immovable in her decision, and Steele backed her intuition with so
many plausible, masculine arguments that he waited. He was packing and
preparing the pictures that were to be shipped to New York. Some of
them would be exhibited and sold there. Others, to be selected by his
Eastern agent, would go on to the Paris market. He had included the
landscape painted on the cliff, on the day when the purple flower
lured him over the edge, and the portrait of the girl. These pictures,
however, he specified, were only for exhibition, and were not under
any circumstances to be sold.
Each day, he insisted on the necessity of his investigation, and
argued it with all the forcefulness he could command, but Duska
steadfastly overruled him.
Once, as the sunset dyed the west with the richness of gold and purple
and orange and lake, they were walking their horses along a hill lane
between pines and cedars. The girl's eyes were drinking in the color
and abundant beauty, and the man rode silent at her saddle skirt. She
had silenced his continual argument after her usual decisive fashion.
Now, she turned her head, and demanded:
"Suppose you went and settled this, would you be nearer your
certainty? The very disproving of this suspicion would leave you where
you were before Senor Ribero told his story."
"It would mean this much," he argued. "I should have followed to its
end every clew that was given me. I should have exhausted the
possibilities, and I could then with a clear conscience leave the rest
to destiny. I could go on feeling that I had a right to abandon the
past because I had questioned it as far as I knew."
She was resolute.
"I should," he urged, "feel that in letting you share the danger I had
at least tried to end it."
She raised her chin almost scornfully, and her eyes grew deeper.
"Do you think that danger can affect my love? Are we the sort of
people who have no eyes in our hearts, and no hearts in our eyes, who
live and marry and die, and never have a hint of loving as the gods
love? I want to love you that way--audaciously--taking every chance.
If the stars up there love, they love like that."
Some days later, Mrs. Horton again referred to her wish to make the
trip to Venezuela. To the man's astonishment, Duska appeared this time
more than half in favor of it, and spoke as though she might after all
reconsider her refusal to be her aunt's traveling companion. Later,
when they were alone, he questioned her, and she laughed with the
note of having a profound secret. At last, she explained.
"I am interested in South America now," she informed him. "I wasn't
before. I shouldn't think of letting you go there, but I guess I'm
safe in Puerto Frio, and I might settle your doubts myself. You see,"
she added judicially, "I'm the one person you can trust not to betray
your secret, and yet to find out all about this mysterious Mr.
Carter."
Saxon was frankly frightened. Unless she promised that she would do
nothing of the sort, he would himself go at once. He had waited in
deference to her wishes, but, if the thing were to be recognized as
deserving investigation at all, he must do it himself. He could not
protect himself behind her as his agent. She finally assented, yet
later Mrs. Horton once more referred to the idea of the trip as though
she expected Duska to accompany her.
Then it was that Saxon was driven back on strategy. The idea was one
that he found it hard to accept, yet he knew that he could never gain
her consent, and her suggestion proved that, though she would not
admit it, at heart she realized the necessity of a solution. The
hanging of his canvases for exhibition afforded an excuse for going to
New York. On his arrival there, he would write to her, explaining his
determination to take a steamer for the south, and "put it to the
touch, to win or lose it all." There seemed to be no alternative.
He did not take Steele into his confidence, because Steele agreed with
Duska, and should be able to say, when questioned, that he had not
been a party to the conspiracy. When Saxon stood, a few days later, on
the step of an inbound train, the girl stood waving her sunbonnet,
slenderly outlined against the green background of the woods beyond
the flag-station. A sudden look of pain crossed the man's face, and he
leaned far out for a last glimpse of her form.
Steele saw Duska's smile grow wistful as the last car rounded the
curve.
"I can't quite accustom myself to it," he said, slowly: "this new girl
who has taken the place of the other, of the girl who did not know how
to love."
"I know more about it," she declared, "than anybody else that ever
lived. And I've only one life to give to it."
Saxon's first mistake was born of the precipitate haste of love. He
wrote the letter to Duska that same evening on the train. It was a
difficult letter to write. He had to explain, and explain
convincingly, that he was disobeying her expressed command only
because his love was not the sort that could lull itself into false
security. If fate held any chance for him, he would bring back
victory. If he laid the ghost of Carter, he would question his sphinx
no further.
The writing was premature, because he had to stop in Washington and
seek Ribero. He had some questions to ask. But, at Washington, he
learned that Ribero had been recalled by government. Then, hurrying
through his business in New York, Saxon took the first steamer
sailing. It happened to be by a slow line, necessitating several
transfers.
It was characteristic of Duska that, when she received the letter
hardly a day after Saxon's departure, she did not at once open it,
but, slipping it, dispatch-like, into her belt, she called the
terrier, and together they went into the woods. Here, sitting among
the ferns with the blackberry thicket at her back and the creek
laughing below, she read and reread the pages.
For a while, she sat stunned, her brow drawn; then, she said to the
terrier in a voice as nearly plaintive as she ever allowed it to be:
"I don't like it. I don't want him ever to go away--and yet--" she
tossed her head upward--"yet, I guess I shouldn't have much use for
him if he didn't do just such things."
The terrier evidently approved the sentiment, for he cocked his head
gravely to the side, and slowly wagged his stumpy tail.
But the girl did not remain long in idleness. For a time, her forehead
was delicately corrugated under the stress of rapid thinking as she
sat, her fingers clasped about her updrawn knees, then she rose and
hurried to Horton House. There were things to be done and done at
once, and it was her fashion, once reaching resolution, to act
quickly.
It was necessary to take Mrs. Horton into her full confidence, because
it was necessary that Mrs. Horton should be ready to go with her, as
fast as trains and steamers could carry them, to a town called Puerto
Frio in South America, and South America was quite a long way off.
Mrs. Horton had known for weeks that something more was transpiring
than showed on the surface. She had even inferred that there was "an
understanding" between her niece and the painter, and this inference
she had not found displeasing. The story that Duska told did astonish
her, but under her composure of manner Mrs. Horton had the ability to
act with prompt decision. Mr. Horton knew only part, but was
complacent, and saw no reason why a trip planned for a later date
should not be "advanced on the docket," and it was so ordered.
Steele, of course, already knew most of the story, and it was he who
kept the telephone busy between the house and the city ticket-offices.
While the ladies packed, he was acquiring vast information as to
schedules and connections. He learned that they could catch an
outgoing steamer from New Orleans, which would probably put them at
their destination only a day or two behind Saxon. Incidentally, in
making these arrangements, Steele reserved accommodations for himself
as well as Mrs. Horton and her niece.
* * * * *
With the American coast left behind, Saxon's journey through the
Caribbean, even with the palliation of the trade-winds, was
insufferably hot. The slenderly filled passenger-list gave the slight
alleviation of an uncrowded ship. Those few travelers whose
misfortunes doomed them to such a cruise at such a time, lay
listlessly under the awnings, and watched the face of the water grow
bluer, bluer, bluer to the hot indigo of the twentieth parallel, where
nothing seemed cool enough for energy or motion except the flying fish
and the pursuing gull.
There were several days of this to be endured, and the painter,
thinking of matters further north and further south, found no delight
in its beauty. He would stand, deep in thought, at the bow when day
died and night was born without benefit of twilight, watching the disk
of the sun plunge into the sea like a diver. It seemed that Nature
herself was here sudden and passionate in matters of life and death.
He saw the stars come out, low-hanging and large, and the water blaze
with phosphorescence wherever a wave broke, brilliantly luminous where
the propeller churned the wake. It was to him an ominous beauty,
fraught with crowding portents of ill omen.
The entering and leaving of ports became monotonous. Each was a
steaming village of hot adobe walls, corrugated-iron custom houses and
sweltering, ragged palms. At last, at a town no more or less appealing
than the others, just as the ear-splitting whistle screeched its last
warning of departure, a belated passenger came over the side from a
frantically-driven row-boat. The painter was looking listlessly out at
the green coast line, and did not notice the new arrival.
The newcomer followed his luggage up the gangway to the deck, his
forehead streaming perspiration, his none-too-fresh gray flannels
splashed with salt water. At the top, he shook the hand of the second
officer, with the manner of an old acquaintance.
"I guess that was close!" he announced, as he mopped his face with a
large handkerchief, and began fanning himself with a stained Panama
hat. "Did the--the stuff get aboard all right at New York?"
The officer looked up, with a quick, cautious glance about him.
"The machinery is stowed away in the hold," he announced.
"Good," replied the newcomer, energetically. "That machinery must be
safeguarded. It is required in the development of a country that needs
developin'. Do I draw my usual stateroom? See the purser? Good!"
The tardy passenger was tall, a bit under six feet, but thin almost to
emaciation. His face was keen, and might have been handsome except
that the alertness was suggestive of the fox or the weasel--furtive
rather than intelligent. The eyes were quick-seeing and roving; the
nose, aquiline; the lips, thin. On them sat habitually a
half-satirical smile. The man had black hair sprinkled with gray, yet
he could not have been more than thirty-six or seven.
"I'll just run in and see the purser," he announced, with his tireless
energy. Saxon, turning from the hatch, caught only a vanishing glimpse
of a tall, flannel-clad figure disappearing into the doorway of the
main saloon, as he himself went to his stateroom to freshen himself up
for dinner.
As the painter emerged from his cabin a few minutes before the call of
the dinner-bugle, the thin man was lounging against the rail further
aft.
Saxon stood for a moment drinking in the grateful coolness that was
creeping into the air with the freshening of the evening breeze.
The stranger saw him, and started. Then, he looked again, with the
swift comprehensiveness that belonged to his keen eyes, and stepped
modestly back into the protecting angle where he could himself be
sheltered from view by the bulk of a tarpaulined life-boat. When Saxon
turned and strolled aft, the man closely followed these movements,
then went into his own cabin.
That evening, at dinner, the new passenger did not appear. He dined in
his stateroom, but later, as Saxon lounged with his own thoughts on
the deck, the tall American was never far away, though he kept always
in the blackest shadow thrown by boats or superstructure on the
moonlit deck. If Saxon turned suddenly, the other would flatten
himself furtively and in evident alarm back into the blackness. He had
the manner of a man who is hunted, and who has recognized a pursuer.
Saxon, ignorant even of the other's presence, had no knowledge of the
interest he was himself exciting. Had his curiosity been aroused to
inquiry, he might have learned that the man who had recently come
aboard was one Howard Stanley Rodman. It is highly improbable,
however, that he would have discovered the additional fact that the
"stuff" Rodman had asked after as he came aboard was not the
agricultural implements described in its billing, but revolutionary
muskets to be smuggled off at sunrise to-morrow to the coast village
La Punta, five miles above Puerto Frio.
Not knowing that a conspirator was hiding away in a cabin through fear
of him, Saxon was of course equally unconscious of having as shipmate
a man as dangerous as the cornered wolf to one who stands between
itself and freedom.
La Punta is hardly a port. The shipping for this section of the east
coast goes to Puerto Frio, and Saxon had not come out of his cabin
the next morning when Rodman left. The creaking of crane chains
disturbed his sleep, but he detected nothing prophetic in the sound.
To have done so, he must have understood that the customs officer at
this ocean flag station was up to his neck in a revolutionary plot
which was soon to burst; that the steamship line, because of interests
of its own which a change of government would advance, had agreed to
regard the rifles in the hold as agricultural implements, and that Mr.
Rodman was among the most expert of traveling salesmen for revolutions
and organizers of _juntas_. To all that knowledge, he must then have
added the quality of prophecy. It is certain, however, that, had he
noted the other's interest in himself and coupled with that interest
the coincidence that the initials of the furtive gentleman's name on
the purser's list were "H. S. R.," he would have slept still more
brokenly.
If he had not looked Mr. Rodman up on the list, Mr. Rodman had not
been equally delinquent. The name Robert A. Saxon had by no means
escaped his attention.