“I thought only,” he answered, “how much the hills looked so—­as a dragon.”

“How strange.”  The trembling phosphorus half-revealed her face, pale and still.  “I was thinking of that, in a way.  It reminded me of what he said, once—­when we were walking together.”

To their great relief, they found themselves talking of Heywood, sadly, but freely, and as it were in a sudden calm.  Their friendship seemed, for the moment, a thing as long established as the dragon hills.  Years afterward, Rudolph recalled her words, plainer than the fiery wonder that spread and burst round their little vessel, or the long play of heat-lightning which now, from time to time, wavered instantly along the eastern sea-line.

“You are right,” she declared once.  “To go on with life, even when we are alone—­You will go on, I know.  Bravely.”  And again she said:  “Yes, such men as he are—­a sort of Happy Warrior.”  And later, in her slow and level voice:  “You learned something, you say.  Isn’t that—­what I call—­being invulnerable?  When a man’s greater than anything that happens to him—­”

So they talked, their speech bare and simple, but the pauses and longer silences filled with deep understanding, solemnized by the time and the place, as though their two lonely spirits caught wisdom from the night, scope from the silent ocean, light from the flickering East.

The flashes, meanwhile, came faster and prolonged their glory, running behind a thin, dead screen of scalloped clouds, piercing the tropic sky with summer blue, and ripping out the lost horizon like a long black fibre from pulp.  The two friends watched in silence, when Rudolph rose, and moved cautiously aft.

“Good-night,” he whispered.  “You must sleep now.”

That was not, however, the reason.  So long as the boiling witch-fire turned their wake to golden vapor, he could not be sure; but whenever the heat-lightning ran, and through the sere, phantasmal sail, the lookout in the bow flashed like a sharp silhouette through wire gauze,—­then it seemed to Rudolph that another small black shape leapt out astern, and vanished.  He stood by the lowdah, watching anxiously.

Time and again the ocean flickered into view, like the floor of a measureless cavern; and still he could not tell.  But at last the lowdah also turned his head, and murmured.  Their boat creaked monotonously, drifting to leeward in a riot of golden mist; yet now another creaking disturbed the night, in a different cadence.  Another boat followed them, rowing fast and gaining.  In a brighter flash, her black sail fluttered, unmistakable.

Rudolph reached for his gun, but waited silently.  He would not call out.  Some chance fisherman, it might be, or any small craft holding the same course along the coast.  Still, he did not like the hurry of the sweeps, which presently groaned louder and threw up nebulous fire.  The stranger’s bow became an arrowhead of running gold.