Up and down the deck paced the nervous, noiseless figure. At last the Duke returned and disappeared from view, through the door by which he had entered the Kentuckian's view.
"I wonder what that meant?" thought Jarvis. "Perhaps he is having a fight with his conscience—just as I have been doing."
And he watched the speeding waves, racing past the great vessel as it seemed—for so steady was the swift advance of the ship that it seemed they were on dry land, rather than the boundless expanse of the depths.
"Here I am—after all my education, all the work of years, to advance myself, running away from my own country—an escaped gun-man, just like an East Side thug."
In the comfortable calm of the shipboard life, with unfamiliar scenes, away from the reminders of his tragedy at Meadow Green, it did not now seem a fine thing that he had done.
Man is not normally a destroyer of his own kind—and his fine instincts were asserting themselves. Yet, after all, despite his vow to his father, this had been actual self-defense.
The other had fired the first shot: he had planned to trap him with a decoy, and in the end it was survival of the fittest.
These thoughts had been frequently in his mind, but he had resolutely driven them from him. Now they were nearing another port, a great commercial cross-ways of the travel world. Here again he was coming within the grasp of the law.
He was not too certain that all had been given up, in that questioning pursuit of the Princess and her party. That broken door lock might yet admit the hand of legal vengeance.
"And that Duke? He'll try to earn that five thousand dollars surely enough now. Well, I'd better be worrying over my own future instead of the dead past. They've said 'let the dead past bury itself, and don't climb the graveyard fence.' That's good logic. But I'd better be looking toward some of the fences ahead. I wonder what is on the paper?"