Suddenly, the inattention of the other had fallen away, and he had wheeled, his jaw dropping. For an instant, he stood in an attitude of bewildered shock, gripping the support of the rail like a prize-fighter struggling against the groggy blackness of the knock-out blow.
Saxon stood such a length of time as it might have required for the referee to count nine over him, had the support he gripped been that of the prize-ring instead of the steamer’s rail. Then, he stepped forward, and gripped Rodman’s arm with fingers that bit into the flesh.
“Rodman,” he said in a low voice that was almost a whisper, between his labored breathings, “I’ve got to talk to you—alone. There’s not a minute to lose. Come to my stateroom.”
CHAPTER XII
Below, in the narrow confines of the cabin, Saxon paced back and forth excitedly as he talked. For five minutes, he did not pause, and the other man, sitting on the camp-stool in a corner of the place, followed him with eyes much as a lion-tamer, shut in a cage with his uncertain charge, keeps his gaze bent on the animal. As he listened, Rodman’s expression ran a gamut from astonishment, through sympathy, and into final distrust. At last, Saxon ended with:
“And, so, I’ve got to get them away from there. I’ve got to get back to that town, and you must manage it. For God’s sake, don’t delay!” The painter had not touched on the irrelevant point of his own mystery, or why the girl had followed him. That would have been a story the other would not have believed, and there was no time for argument and futile personalities. The slow northward fifteen knots had all at once become a fevered racing in the wrong direction, and each throb of the shafts in the engine-room seemed to hurl him madly through space away from his goal.
When he halted in his narrative, the other man looked sternly up, and his sharp features were decisively set.
“Suppose I should get you there,” he began swiftly. “Suppose it were possible to get back in time, what reason have I to trust you? Suppose I were willing to trust you absolutely, what right have I—a mere agent of a cause that’s bigger than single lives—to send you back there, where a word from you would spoil everything? My God, man, there are thousands of people there who are risking their lives to change this government. Hundreds of them must die to do it. For months, we have worked and planned, covering and secreting every detail of our plotting. We have all taken our lives in our hands. Now, a word of warning, an indiscreet act, the changing of the garrison on San Francisco, and where would we be? Every platoon that follows Vegas and Miraflores marches straight into a death-trap! The signal is given, and every man goes to destruction as swift as a bat out of hell. That’s what you are asking me to do—to play traitor to my cause. And you calmly tell me I must do it simply because you’ve got friends in town.”