“Wait!” cried the Professor, and cast a furtive deprecating glance back at Mary.  “Wait!  I tell you it’s no use; you can hurt yourself and disfigure yourself and weaken and impair your body, but not the life!  Not the life!  I tell you—­it’s no good!” He flung out a long arm and his great forefinger pointed at Smith imperatively.  “I’ll have you back,” he said.  “I’ll have you back.  You’re mine, my man; and I’ll hold you.  Put that pistol down; put it down, I tell you!  Or else——­” his arm dropped, and the command failed from his voice.  He spoke in the tones of tired indifference.  “Do it,” he said.  “Shoot yourself, if you want to.  I’ll deal with you afterwards.”

There was a pause, measured in heart-beats.  Smith showed yet his face of serene gravity.  When he spoke, it was strange to hear the voice of the back-streets, the gutter’s phrase, expressing that quiet assurance.

“If it wasn’t you,” he said, “it wouldn’t be nobody else.  It’s only you as can do it.”  He paused, with lips pursed in deliberation.  “If you knowed what I know,” he went on, “you’d see it wasn’t right.  I reckon you’ll have to come too.”

“Eh?” The Professor looked up quickly, and threw up an arm as though to guard a blow.  Mary screamed, and the noise of the shot startled her from her posture and she fell on her knees.  The Professor took one pace forward, turned sharply, and fell full length on his face.  She heard Smith say something, but the words passed her undistinguished; then the second shot sounded, and the fire-irons clattered as he tumbled among them.

Those that ran up to the room upon the sound of the shooting found her kneeling in the door with her hand over her face.

“Bury them! bury them!” she was crying.  “Bury them and let them go!”

XIV

THE CAPTAIN’S ARM

Seafaring men knew it for a chief characteristic of Captain Price—­ his quiet, unresting watchfulness.  Forty years of sun and brine had bunched the puckers at the corners of his eyes and hardened the lines of his big brown face; but the outstanding thing about him was still that silent wariness, as of a man who had warning of something impending.  It went a little strangely with his figure of a massive, steel-and-hickory shipmaster, soaked to the soul with the routine of his calling.  It seemed to give token of some faculty held in reserve, to hint at an inner life, as it were; and not a few of the frank and simple men who went to sea with him found it disconcerting.  Captains who could handle a big steamship as a cyclist manages a bicycle they had seen before; they recognized in him the supreme skill, the salt-pickled nerve, the iron endurance of a proven sailor; but there their experience ended and the depths began.

Sooner or later, most of them went to the Burdock’s chief mate for an explanation of the unknown quality.  “What makes your father act so?” was a common form of the question.  Arthur Price would smile and shake his handsome head.