“Steady as she goes my friend,” broke in Squire Hardy, looking at Nat. “Answer the lady’s question. What made you think you would win?”
“I refuse to answer.”
“He really doesn’t need to answer,” said Elsa. “I will answer for him. Code kindly let me have the log of the M. C. Burns.”
Schofield drew the old book from his pocket and handed it through the bars. Then Elsa, opening it to the last pages, read aloud the few entries that Code had discovered that day when he was a prisoner aboard the Nettie B. As she read the silence was intense, but all eyes were upon Nat, who, startled at the sudden appearance of this document he had so long forgotten, chewed savagely upon his dead cigar. His face had grown pale and his rough hands were clasped tightly together.
“You see,” said Elsa, when she had finished, “that Burns had determined upon the winning of his next race. It is perfectly clear, is it not?”
The breathless circle nodded.
It was a strange setting for the working out of the drama. Overhead a suspended oil-lamp flamed and smelled. Outside the crash of surf against the rocks came to them, and the wind whistled about the eaves of the little stone building.
“Now the mirror,” she said to Code, and, still wondering, he handed the trinket to her. “Tell 287 about this,” she directed him with a smile and a long look from her deep dark eyes.
And Code told them. He told of the time his father first gave it to him, of his experiments in astronomy, and of Nat’s coveting the mirror. He told of that night after the first race when he had looked for the log-book of the May and had seen the mirror in its drawer. He told of its final discovery in the secret box of the storeroom on the Nettie.