Emily Granville could not have helped hearing what was said at the
purser's window. The shock of the revelation stunned her. It seemed
impossible that fate could have placed her in the same ship with the man
whose fiendishness had gloomed her whole life.
With her nerves overwrought and her senses reeling, she sought her
berth. There she argued with herself that the man who had spoken to the
purser must be mistaken. It was not true, she persisted in thinking. The
man whom the steamship agency manager had told her was Captain
Whitridge--the man who had given up his room to her--could not be
Lavelle. His was not a face that could mask such a fiend. It was too
fine and yet the sadness of it--the pain she had seen in his
eyes--returned to startle her.
"I can't! I won't believe it!" she said to herself over and over again,
fighting the sense of foreboding that grew in her heart.
But dinner time brought a brutal confirmation. A passenger at the
captain's table where Emily Granville sat blurted out, before the
skipper could stop him, how the _Cambodia's_ first officer had seen the
man called Whitridge come aboard and had recognized him as Lavelle. He
pointed him out, sitting with bent head, at a table across the saloon.
With white face and scared, staring eyes Emily Granville left her place.
Somehow she got to her room. A little while later her maid found her
senseless in her berth and revived her only to hear her cry and moan
that furies--black furies--were tearing at her pillow. And she breathed
heavily as one spent from swimming.
Before the _Cambodia_ had dropped Mera Head behind the horizon the loss
of the Alaskan liner _Yakutat_ had been dragged out of its ten-year past
and gossiped from one end of the ship to the other. What details proved
elusive were blithely manufactured into the fabric of a sea disaster
which had shocked the world and made a nation ashamed. Men shook their
heads ominously and women shuddered as the fact passed from mouth to
mouth that Lavelle, the _Yakutat's_ second officer, who had beaten
drowning passengers with an oar, was among them. When it became known
that Emily Granville, whose parents had been driven away from Lavelle's
boat, was also in the _Cambodia_ and lying ill in her room from the
shock of knowing that Lavelle was a fellow-passenger, a tenseness came
upon things that made the nerves of the liner's officers raw.
Paul Lavelle did not enter the dining saloon after that first night. It
became known that he took his meals in his room and left it only after
darkness fell. Watch officers saw him from the bridge now and then--a
shadow in the night.
"Wandering around like a pariah dog," one of them told a passenger.
Often they saw "The Shadow" as late as dawn.
But this night--it was the fifth out of Yokohama--the deck saw "The
Shadow" earlier than it was his wont to appear. The saloon was bright
and gay with an entertainment and Lavelle was taking advantage of this.
He met only one or two straying couples in the darkness and they soon
went inside. It was not a night that invited one with moon or star. He
could remember few nights like it. It was a dead black--shocking in its
intensity. The _Cambodia_ might have been a ship without funnels or
masts. Everything was cut off sheer by the blackness. There was a light
breeze which seemed to dart out from every point of the compass at once.
It whimpered as it went by his ears.
After a long, steady, hard walk "The Shadow" sought out his favorite
vigil post against the pipe rail under the weather wing of the bridge.
It was to port to-night, although it was hard to tell the weather side
from the lee. He gleaned some comfort from the thought that the liner
was rapidly slipping down to "the corner"--the intersection of the 180th
meridian and the 30th parallel--through which ships great circle between
Yokohama and the Hawaiian Islands. She was due to turn it the following
afternoon and that meant half his passage in her done. He had determined
to quit the ship at Honolulu.
Just after the lights went out in the saloon at one bell--a half-hour
after midnight--and the silence of the dark hours had settled upon the
ship, he sensed somebody stealing along the side of the deck house. He
fixed a shape finally, but no sooner had he done so than it disappeared.
He could not tell whether it was the form of a man or woman. Then, he
heard a heavy breath at his feet and jumped back defensively. A hand
touched him and he grabbed it.
"Master!" whispered a voice in Chinese. Chang rose beside him.
"Chang," was all he could say. He was overwhelmed by the loyalty of
this yellow heart which could give and give and ask no return.
"I stow way. Make him work--shubbel coal like hell. No can kom-men here
bee-fore. I go 'Flisco." Lavelle heard the sound of a heavy footfall
approaching. Chang's ears caught it, too. "Good-by. To-mollah night I
kom-men gain."
A lantern light cut the darkness and the ship's night watchman dashed
round from the lee side of the deck house, with a club raised to strike.
He lowered his arm as he discovered Lavelle.
"Seen anything of a big coolie stoker round here, sir?"
"No," answered Lavelle.
"Been tryin' to get aroun' up here the past three nights," and the
watchman muttered off into the blackness.
"The Shadow" pondered a long time as to what he could do for Chang, but
he could come to no decision. The thought that he was in the ship
cheered him though as he went to his room. That hand in the darkness and
the hand-clasp of a frail woman in black--one with her cage in the zoo
of life like himself--were the only friendly touches which had come to
him. Elsie of Shanghai was grateful, and had sought him out the night
of sailing to tell him so, because he had kept her alive. She would
never forget that he had sheltered her from death in the Shanghai riots.
Chang would lay down his life to pay the debt he considered he owed him
for saving his yellow carcass from the knives of a drunken mob of
sailors. Everybody wanted to cling to life and he smiled grimly to
himself in the darkness at the thought. He had removed his overcoat and
coat and as he put out his hand to grope for the electric flash he
muttered, "What a comedy! What a comedy!"
The next instant he was pitched headlong against the side of the vessel
by a shock which rattled her like an empty basket. A sea slapped through
the open port of the room and choked him with its brine.