There was no sportsmanlike determination about him! Code quickly changed his point of view. How could Nat be so sure he was going to win?

The thing was ridiculous on the face of it. The fifty-year-old May had limped in half an hour ahead of the thirty-year-old M. C. Burns after a race of fifteen miles. How, then, could Nat swear with any degree of certainty that he would win the second time. It was well known that the M. C. Burns was especially good in heavy weather, but how could Nat ordain that there would be just the wind and sea he wanted?

The thing was absurd on the face of it, and, besides, silly braggadocio, if not actually malicious. And even if it were malicious, Code thanked Heaven that the race had not been sailed, and that he had 193 been spared the exhibition of Nat’s malice. He had escaped that much, anyway.

However, from motives of general caution, Code decided to take the book with him. Nat had evidently forgotten it, and he felt sure he would get off the ship with it in his possession. Now, as he drew near to St. Andrews, he put it for the last time inside the lining of his coat, and fastened that lining together with pins, of which he always carried a stock under his coat-lapel.

As Schofield had not forgotten the old log of the M. C. Burns, neither had he forgotten the threat he made to Nat that he would try his best to escape, and would defy his authority at every turn.

He had tried to fulfil his promise to the letter. Twice he had removed one of the windows before the alert guard detected him, and once he had nearly succeeded in cutting his way through the two-inch planking of his ceiling before the chips and sawdust were discovered, and he was deprived of his clasp-knife.

Every hour of every day his mind had been constantly on this business of escape. Even during the reading, to which he fled to protect his reason, it was the motive of every chapter, and he would drop off in the middle of a page into a reverie, and grow inwardly excited over some wild plan that mapped itself out completely in his feverish brain.

194

Now as they approached St. Andrew’s his determination was as strong as ever, but his resources were exhausted. Double-guarded and without weapons, he found himself helpless. The fevered excitement of the past four days had subsided into a dull apathy of hurt in which his brain was as delicate and alert as the mainspring of a watch. He was resigned to the worst if it came, but was ready, like a panther in a tree, to spring at the slightest false move of his enemies.

Now for the last time he went over his little eight-by-ten prison. He examined the chair as though it were some instrument of the Inquisition. He pulled the bed to pieces and handled every inch of the frame. He emptied every compartment of the queer hanging cabinet that had been stuffed with books and miscellanies; he examined every article in the room.