“Where do you go, monsieur?” inquired the Frenchman.
“Go? God knows!” replied Rodman, as he gazed about in perplexity. “But I’ve got to beat it, and beat it quick.”
A moment later, he was lost in the shadows.
CHAPTER XIV
When Duska Filson had gone out into the woods that day to read Saxon’s runaway letter, she had at once decided to follow, with regal disdain of half-way methods. To her own straight-thinking mind, unhampered with petty conventional intricacies, it was all perfectly clear. The ordinary woman would have waited, perhaps in deep distress and tearful anxiety, for some news of the man she loved, because he had gone away, and it is not customary for the woman to follow her wandering lover over a quadrant of the earth’s circumference. Duska Filson was not of the type that sheds tears or remains inactive. To one man in the world, she had said, “I love you,” and to her that settled everything. He had gone to the place where his life was imperiled in the effort to bring back to her a clear record. If he were fortunate, her congratulation, direct from her own heart and lips, should be the first he heard. If he were to be plunged into misery, then above all other times she should be there. Otherwise, what was the use of loving him?
But, when the steamer was under way, crawling slowly down the world by the same route he had taken, the days between quick sunrise and sudden sunset seemed interminable.
Outwardly, she was the blithest passenger on the steamer, and daily she held a sort of salon for the few other passengers who were doomed to the heat and the weariness of such a voyage.
But, when she was alone with Steele in the evening, looking off at the moonlit sea, or in her own cabin, her brow would furrow, and her hands would clench with the tensity of her anxiety. And, when at last Puerto Frio showed across the purple water with a glow of brief sunset behind the brown shoulder of San Francisco, she stood by the rail, almost holding her breath in suspense, while the anchor chains ran out.