“I suggested to the Senor that he let me see you, but he thought to the contrary.  He is my commanding officer....  As for you, Bedient, all I have to say is that you carry—­a maniac’s luck.  I think—­I think if you hadn’t looked so like a dead man, Senor Rey would have done the natural thing, as you came forth from the forecastle."...  The big chap glanced at the pistol on the table.  “What is it you want with me?”

Again and again, in the stifling forecastle, Bedient had swooned from the heat, the vile air and his utter weakness.  Only he had nailed to his brain surfaces, through terrific concentration, an expectancy for Miss Mallory’s signals; otherwise they would have failed to rouse him.  He had come forth more dead than alive, with only a glimmering of what he was to do, until he saw the hand of Celestino Rey move toward his pocket.  Then a strange jolt of strength shook him, and he had the pistol.  It was like that day on the Truxton.  Afterward he heard the words of Miss Mallory insisting that Sorenson could swim, and amusement helped to clear his consciousness.  A queer sense that he was not to lose in these lesser affairs possessed him; that enough strength, enough intelligence would be given, a peculiar inner sustaining which he was odd enough to accept as authoritative....  And now he heard Framtree’s words, and a water-bottle on the table beside the pistol magnetized his eye.  He poured out a glassful and drank, and the thought came—­apart from his listening to Framtree—­if only other agonies could be eased with the swift directness of his thirst-torture that moment.

“I wanted you to go back on the Hatteras, Mr. Framtree,” he said.  “The Henlopen won’t sail for a week.  We won’t lose sight of each other, so there is time.  As for our talk, we must be alone.”

The words crippled Framtree’s hostility, but he did not forget Rey.  It was a hard moment for him.

“One wouldn’t think you had a week—­to judge by the chances you took in turning this trick to-day,” he said.

The Spaniard’s bony shoulders sank a little in his lids dropped for an instant.

“You proved so hard to reach in these days of preparation,” Bedient replied, “that I feared I might fail altogether in case of eventualities.  And we had reason to think that to-night marked the end of Equatorian peace.”

Rey moistened his lips, watching Framtree, but did not speak.

“It must be damned important,” Framtree said.

“It is,” Bedient answered, and the American woman listening intently at the wheel did not miss the change in his voice.

Meanwhile the yellow-brown face of the Spaniard had scarcely altered, except perhaps that the pallid scar had a bit more shine about it.  His eyes moved around the cabin, darting often at the pistol, halting upon the knob of the forecastle-door in the fear that others might be concealed there; inscrutable black brilliants, these eyes, and to the woman at the wheel the cabin was evil from their purgatorial restlessness....  Suddenly he started, and commanded Framtree: