tint as she heard me promise it, and her red lips, parting, took on a tremulous smile.
“Thank you,” she murmured in frank gratitude. “I thought—I knew you would help me!” Then she was gone.
My trance broken I woke to hear myself softly swearing. I consigned myself to my proper home, an asylum; I wished the girl at Timbuktu, Kamchatka, Land’s End—anywhere except on this ship. As I had told the agent of the Phillipson Rifles, I am no boy. One can scarcely knock about the world for thirty years without gaining some of its wisdom; and of all the appropriate truisms I spared myself not one.
Resentfully I reminded myself that mysteries were suspicious, that honest people seldom had need of secrecy, that idiots who, like me, consented to act blindfold would probably repent their blindness in sackcloth and ashes before long. But what use were these sage reflections? I had given my word to her. I was in for the consequences, however unpleasant they proved.
Without further mental parley I went down to my cabin, where I routed out from among my traps a bronze paper-weight as heavy as lead. Wrapping the mysterious sheet about it, I brought the package back on deck. There was not a soul in sight; it was a propitious hour.
To right and to left the coast lights were slipping past, making golden paths on the black water as our tug pulled us out to sea. The reservists down below were singing “Va fuori, o stranier!” I dropped my package overboard, watched it vanish, and turned to behold the sphinx-like Van Blarcom, sprung up as if by magic, regarding me placidly from the shelter of the smoking-room door.
CHAPTER V
MR. VAN BLARCOM. U. S. A.
For a trip that had begun with such rich promise of the unusual, my voyage on the Re d’Italia proved a gratifying anticlimax during its first few days. The weather was bad. We plowed forward monotonously, flagless, running between dark-gray water and a lowering, leaden sky. Screws throbbed, timbers creaked, and dishes crashed as the Gulf Stream took us, and great waves reared themselves round us like myriads of threatening Alps.
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