Even while he bent reverently over the unlucky Chilean's body, the
deafening vibration of the fog-horn ceased, and he heard Elsie's glad
cry from the saloon: "Oh my, here comes Joey! That means that Captain Courtenay has left
the bridge."
The girl's joyous exclamation, her prelude to a paean of thanks that
the dreadful necessary slaying of men had ceased, was a strange
commentary on the shattered form stretched at the commander's feet.
Among the small company on board, it had been decreed that one, at
least, after surviving so many perils, should never see home and kin
again.
He gave orders that the dead man should be carried to the poop to await
a sailor's burial; then he turned, and with less sprightly step
descended the main companion. In the saloon he found Elsie and
Christobal watching the stairs expectantly. The girl had the dog in
her arms, and Courtenay perceived, for the first time, that Joey's off
fore paw had been cut by the broken glass which littered the floor of
the chart-house.
"Then the attack has really failed?" was Elsie's greeting. "I saw some
of the canoes turn and scurry away. That was the first good sign. And
then Joey came."
"You saw them?" repeated Courtenay, his bent brows emphasizing the
question.
"Yes. I was looking through one of the ports. Was that wrong?"
"Which one?"
She pointed. "That one," said she, wondering that he had never a smile
for her.
"Then you must obey orders more faithfully next time. A man was shot
dead by a stray bullet not three feet above your head."
She paled, and her eyes fell before his stern gaze, which did not
deceive her at all, for she read the unspoken agony of his thought.
"I am sorry," she murmured, "not so much on my own account, though I
shall be more careful in future, but because some one has suffered.
Who is it? Not one of our own people, I hope?"
"A fireman; I think his name is Gama. You have hardly seen him, I
fancy, but I regret his loss exceedingly. It must have been the merest
accident."
The captain of the Kansas was certainly preoccupied, or he would
never have failed to inquire the extent of Joey's injury. Nor would
either he or Elsie have forgotten that Christobal was not "one of our
own people," though the girl might protest hotly against any invidious
twisting of the phrase.
The Spaniard missed nothing of Courtenay's solicitude for Elsie's
well-being, nor of her shy confusion. By operation of the occult law
which governs static electricity, it was possible that the magnetism
flowing between those two communicated itself to a third person.
However that might be, Christobal was under no sort of doubt that,
unless another "accident" intervened, he had lost all chance of winning
this woman's love.