Paul ran straight from the poop into the eyes of the _Daphne_. There the
trail of gas led him. It was the coal in the fore hatch that had been
exposed and wet. He went below through the chain locker, but only to
remain a second. A sulphurous wave of heat drove him on deck, choking
for breath. A furnace was back of it. There was no fire to be seen, but
this man did not have to see it to know what the blast that repulsed him
meant. He knew these Australian coal cargoes too well. This was not the
result of the mutineers' abortive effort to destroy the _Daphne_. This
was a fire of spontaneous combustion. It was deeply seated. These coals
had been in the bark more than one hundred and sixteen days to his own
knowledge, which was drawn from the log and the time since he had
boarded her. How long she had lain in Sydney after being loaded there
was no way of telling.
Coals of this kind, laden in hulls like the _Daphne's_, which were never
built for such cargoes, generate gas after a certain period, and unless
watched incessantly and ventilated properly fire is the certain result.
The Pacific deeps hold the secret of many a ship brought to her doom
through such a lading.
That night the constant northwesterly summoned a new freshness to its
drive as if it sensed the _Daphne's_ peril. When Paul relieved Emily at
the wheel at seven o'clock she was crying with the pain in her arms. She
had been standing there a full five hours. Not since they had been
sailing to the eastward had Paul permitted her to take a trick beyond
two hours. She had to walk up and down the deck swinging her arms and
flexing her fingers to get the numbness out of them.
"Emily, I'd suffer any pain to take yours away," Paul said. "I feel like
a whipped cur to see you going through all this terror and hardship--and
to think I can't do anything to put any of it away from you."
His tenderness flooded her eyes with tears. Strife always brought him
close to her.
"Don't, Paul, please," she said bravely, attempting to control her
voice. "You will--you will have me breaking--going to pieces in a
moment."
She put her hands to her face and leaned against the casing over the
steering gear.
"Emily, I want you to get for'ard and get a bite to eat and then turn
in," he said. "I'm going to try to let you sleep for three hours--maybe
until midnight. I've everything battened down forward. The fire's all
there. Not a sign aft--no temperature. It's this wind and our strength
against the beast that's under decks."
He did not tell her what a beast he knew it to be.
The morning of the fifth day after the discovery of the fire Paul fixed
the _Daphne's_ position one hundred and fifty miles to the south and
west of San Francisco.
"Only another day, partner! Maybe an hour may bring a vessel to us!" She
had just relieved him at the wheel. Through these five days the _Daphne_
had come driving without sighting a sail: unspoken save by the voice of
the northwest wind. Once they had seen the black smoke plume of an
outward-bound steamer, but it was too far away for the _Daphne's_ signal
of distress to be seen.
Paul seemed to be living by will alone: to be endowed of a force that
only death could stay. When he slept the gold woman had no idea. He had
relieved her at the wheel every two hours, night and day, but when she
was steering she frequently heard him at work in the engine room. From
the very first night he had slept beside that engine, kept its fires
alive and a stream of steam flowing into the forehold through a pipe led
down through the chain locker. He had explained to her that water on a
fire like this would have been of as little use as oil: that gases had
to be smothered.
Emily sensed that a greater danger menaced them than Paul had revealed.
This had been suggested to her when on the second day she had seen him
finish a raft built of doors and forecastle bunkboards. But she had
learned of the storm not to ask questions. What this man chose to tell
he would tell.
Never had he seemed more splendid than as he stood before her this
morning telling the _Daphne's_ position, and in the same breath
whispering again the belief that had come to him the night before that
the steam was choking the beast in the hold. Bare-armed, bareheaded,
lithe with a thoroughbred's suppleness, he was, in her sight, an urn of
the divine fire from which mankind draws its noblest impulses.
"We'll win through yet, Paul! In justice we must!" she called to him as
he went forward.
She saw him come to the galley door a few minutes later with a cup of
steaming coffee and, as he ate of a biscuit and drank, he waved to her.
He darted inside and a moment later came running aft with a cup for her.
"I've had my coffee, dearheart," she said.
"Half a dozen cups won't hurt you. I put two spoons of sugar in
this--sand, save the mark."
With that he was gone from her again. Emily watched him breaking coal
out of a corner of the main hatch for use in the donkey. She smiled as
she remembered his commentary on the grimness of stealing coal from one
end of the ship to make fire to put out coal already afire in the other
end. It was the old, old principle of fighting fire with fire in a new,
weird form.
Watching her partner drew Emily's attention from the _Daphne_. A warning
slat of the weather leech of the to'galluns'l brought her eyes back to
the bark and the compass. She had just succeeded in getting the vessel
on her course of northeast again, when a roar with a shriek whistling
through it came bursting aft. A cloud of steam poured from the engine
room door.
Shrieking Paul's name, Emily paused but a second when no answer came.
She became a flame of action. With the quickness of thought and the
instinct of his training guiding her hands, she snapped the wheel into
its beckets, let the spanker sheet go by the run and, leaping forward,
cast the halyards off their pin.
Only belching steam answered her cry of Paul. Into it she hurled
herself. It flung her back. She became as a tigress at the repulse. She
was not to be denied. Instinct brought her to her hands and knees. It
told her to go in under the scalding vapor. Just inside the door she
found her own and snatched him into the life-giving air.
When Paul awoke to consciousness fifteen minutes later it was to find
the face of the gold woman bending over him. He put up his arms and drew
her face down against his hot lips and held it there.
"You, you," he murmured, and he found the precious lips which had kissed
him again and again in his unconsciousness. They answered him as if they
would breathe the strength of immortal life into his form.
"Not even death can take you from me!" she cried, and started up
savagely. She might have expected to find the grim specter himself to
grapple at her side.
"Not even--death----"
Lavelle sighed and his eyes closed in a seeming weariness of pain. His
arms fell from her neck.
"Oh, God, you mustn't take him from me! You must not!"
It was an appeal, a command, a challenge of defiance. The cry with which
she sent it heavenward pierced above the roar of the steam and the
warring sails and hamper above.
Although this lone woman's extremity was great, yet of her association
with Paul Lavelle she had learned to order her wits in the presence of
disaster.
"If the next minute seems to be the last, just keep on
fighting--hammering ahead," he had said to her so many times.
She remembered how he had given strychnine to McGovern to stimulate
heart action--the oil he had put on the poor fellow's burns. She ran aft
and in a drawer in the medicine chest which she looted of bandages and
lint she discovered by accident a bottle of brandy. When she returned to
Paul he was just opening his eyes again. He shook his head at the liquor
when he had taken but a sip of it.
"Some starch and water," he whispered, "or glycerine. There's some
aft----"
Emily found a bottle of glycerine. A few minutes after he had swallowed
a mouthful of it he nodded that he felt easier.
"Steam--afraid it got inside," he whispered. "Tried--remember keep my
mouth shut. Steam's bad to swallow. Water injector--on the boiler--blew
out. Hit me somewhere in the middle. Happened all in a second."
He fainted while Emily was drawing the boot off his left leg which he
had indicated hurt him most. The limb was scalded from the knee down.
His arms and the backs of his hands, too, were blistered. His face was
grimed with ashes and soot, but when Emily washed it she found it free
of burn or hurt. The while her loving hands swathed him and soothed his
wounds she crooned like a wild thing over its whelp.
When he revived she was holding his head in her lap just as she had in
the _Cambodia's_ boat. His eyelids lifted to her kisses. He put up a
hand and touched her cheek and she patted it. He smiled at the
reassurance that it was not a dream. Many, many times he had awakened to
put out his hand like that--to touch that face and met only emptiness.
The jade ring which he had put on Emily's finger drew his glance and
held it for a second.
"'Man has many reckonings with man, but only one with God,'" he
repeated. "'Only one with God.'"
The escaping steam by this time had spent its strongest volume. It was
now no more than a hiss. The _Daphne_ had fallen off before the wind
again and the noise aloft had practically ceased.
"I feel this is the reckoning, partner," he whispered.
With a sob she bent and kissed him with all the passion of her being.
"And for the touch of those lips," Paul went on, "the reckoning--cannot
be too hard."
"No, no, dearheart----No, no! This is not the reckoning--only the
beginning of the future."
Paul shook his head.
"I have thought of the future, but it can't be--for me. If things had
been different I should have found you though you had been at the ends
of the world. And I should have come for you and taken you." A flash of
the old conquering spirit lit his eyes. "I should have taken you despite
a world against me. It is part of the--the reckoning that we
should--have met; like strange ships on the sea and to have sailed
together for this little while. But it wasn't to be that we were to get
home together. And that is right. That is right."
"Paul, Paul, this hopelessness is not like you. You will live! You must
live!"
"But I don't want to live," he answered very calmly. "I am nothing but a
worthless, broken thing--marked among men. I haven't even a name to give
you. I am a pariah man--darling. That's----"
"Listen, Paul--look up at me so that you will know that it is my soul
speaking to you. All that fortune has given me is as nothing to just the
glance with which you are looking up at me now. All that I have is
yours--my soul, my flesh, my blood, my every breath, my life! Had you
nowhere to lay your head I would follow you. Had you only rags to cover
me I would wear them as robes of state. Had you only a crust from the
gutter to share with me it would be a feast. Were the whole world to
revile you its scorn would make me proud. I would wear its spittle like
jewels. My love would be my crown."
Emily Granville was burning with the divine fire of a sublime love. Her
message to this man, who to her was more than all the earth and its
treasures--more than life itself, burst from her lips with the
passionate rush of a mountain stream seeking the ocean.
"Can you not understand that my love would be a poor weak, despicable
thing if this were not so? That I would not be worthy of my womanhood?"
She choked back the tears as she asked these questions; she kissed the
face which she pressed against her breast.
"That you might live--I would die with a smile and with but one regret:
That it had not been permitted to me to bear a man child like you.
"But there is a future, Paul. The world will not drive us forth. Life--a
fine, clean, God-fearing life is waiting for us over there--just through
the Golden Gate. It is a golden gate which will close out the
past--forever and ever."
"It cannot be locked out, dear."
"But it can. I can lock it out. The world must listen to me. It must
believe me. Justice works in strange ways, but it brought us that poor
man out of the sea. I can tell the world his story. He was with you on
the _Yakutat_."
Paul started and caught her hand.
"Then, it was not a vagary," he whispered. "That was Driscoll--the
quartermaster."
"He was in the boat with you that night. I don't know what name you knew
him by. But he told me what happened--the truth. Had he never spoken I
should have known the truth. If the world would not listen to you, it
will listen to me! It will take back its lies! If----"
Emily's voice broke and she lowered her head in the embrace of the
wounded arms which encircled her neck. The pent-up tears of all her
travail of spirit since their paths had crossed--the tears choked back
and fought back through the dark hours of all the weeks that had
gone--would not be longer stayed. On his breast she poured them, and her
one thought was that if death must be her love's victor it would strike
them quickly in each other's arms.