He turned, with that, and strode toward the missionary and the girl; and at the same instant Dan Darrin caught Red’s eye, and the two stood for a moment in a wordless and motionless conflict. In that clash of eyes, Dan Darrin told the mate that he was the Captain’s man; and Red Pawl understood, and made no sign, but turned away.
They made out of the bay the third day after, the homeward-bound pennant flying. The wooded shores slid past them, lush green beneath the sun; and as dusk came on, they dropped the islands behind them, and the sudden night of the tropics came down. Overhead, the stars. Darrin and the girl were on the quarter-deck together. Once in the open sea, Black Pawl and his son had gone below. Ruth liked Dan Darrin. She liked Black Pawl. She liked the harpooners—liked every man aft, save perhaps the Captain’s son. Red Pawl was a hard man to like, on any count. But the others were her friends.
Darrin, however, already held a place apart. They were within a few years of the same age; he was an honest, four-square man with a clear eye, and she was a girl, and beautiful. Perhaps it lay in that. They looked out across the sea, this night, and up at the stars. The stars in southern seas are nearer and more intimate than in our northern latitude. It is as if the veil of our smoky atmosphere were drawn aside; and they ride the heavens for us clear and unobscured. The eye more easily penetrates the vast reaches of infinity; and the stars appear in orderly perspective, less like luminous pin-holes in a deep, blue board. Dan Darrin spoke of this to the girl; and she replied that she had never seen them otherwise.
“You mean you were born out here? Never been back home?”
“I was born back home,” she told him. “But I was only a baby when we came out here,—my mother and I,—you see. So I don’t remember.”
He wanted to ask her more. Where was “back home”? He knew her name; but what lay behind her name? He was eager to read each chapter and each page of her Book of Life. But something—perhaps it was her own reticence—held his tongue.
Another had wondered with him—Red Pawl. The first mate had a hot eye for a woman, beautiful or not. And this woman was beautiful. He had watched her sidewise, from the beginning; he had asked herself about herself. She told him nothing; and he went to the old missionary, who told him no more than nothing. “She and her mother lived on the island, near me,” he said. “When her mother died, last spring, she came to me. I saw she must go back to her kind. So—we are going. That is all.”
“Running away?” Red Pawl suggested maliciously. “Why? What from?”
The missionary looked at him steadily. “From men unfit to look upon her,” he said; and Red Pawl, in spite of himself, was abashed, and let the matter lie.
When, on this night, he missed Darrin and the girl, he went on deck and found them, and the stars. So he gave Darrin a task to do, thinking to have the girl to himself. But she went below as soon as Darrin left her, in spite of Red Pawl’s suggestion that she keep the deck with him.