Fortunately Margaret had not yet unpacked anything, and Elliott brought her down the stairs with a rush, and hurried her into the cab. It was only a few hundred yards to the dock, but as they neared it they heard the gruff warning whistle of the liner.
“Oh, is it too late?” gasped Margaret, who was very pale.
The gangplank was being cleared as the party rushed down the platform; the plank was drawn ashore almost before they had reached the deck. There was another hoarse blast from the great whistle; a shout of “All clear aft!” and then the space between the wharf and the ship’s side began to widen.
“Safe!” said Bennett. “It’s an omen.”
But Elliott pulled the crumpled telegram from his pocket where he had crammed it, and showed it to Margaret.
“I don’t care,” said she, still breathing hard from the race. “We will be there before them. I feel it.”
“Heaven send you’re right. You’re taking a big responsibility,” replied Elliott, gravely.
“That reminds me that we didn’t have time to answer that cable,” Bennett put in. “Never mind. Henninger will be wild, but we had nothing to say.”
It is a long way from Southampton to Cape Town, even when one is not in a hurry. But when life and death, or money, which in modern life is the same thing, hangs upon the ship’s speed, the length of the passage is doubled and tripled, for the ordinary pastimes of sea life become impossible. Shuffleboard is frivolous; books are impertinent, and there is no interest in passing ships or monsters of the deep. The three adventurers hung together, talking little, but mutely sharing the strain of uncertainty. Late one night in the second week, Elliott suddenly proposed poker to Bennett.
“Big stakes,” he said, “payable from our profits later? It’ll kill the cursed time.”