“Warlock indeed!” he commented, with a laugh. “The Star of Dreams is still guiding, and whither the star goes, I follow. It may well be that there is some truth behind all this rank superstition—singular, how Deakin spoke of the Star Woman! Coincidence in the names, of course—yet I wonder!”
He laughed again at the fancy, but quickly sobered. Crawford himself was tempted to be a trifle superstitious about that emerald star. First he had taken it as a symbol of his own flight from the world, of his quest after a freedom that did not exist. From talking of it with Frontin or Sir Phelim Burke, a reaction had inevitably taken effect upon his own mind. He fought against this and scorned it, yet none the less it lingered. Consequently, Deakin’s belief in a connection between star and Star Woman made an appeal to him—until he forced himself to dismiss the whole thing as the wanderings of an unsound brain, the superstitious fancy of a bestial man.
“The Danish river!” he reflected, coming back again to his immediate problems. “If I knew where that place lay, and had food, I believe I’d try for it——”
He was now out of the ice and distinctly warmer, the breeze was freshening slightly, the fog was somewhat less dense. So, careless whither he was carried, he found the boat’s bottom to be sound and dry, and promptly curled up for a much-needed sleep.
Morning came and he slept on, while the long wraiths of grey fog fled across the waters and thinned into shadows, and the wind came ever fresher and steadier out of the southeast to scatter the dissipating mist and blow the skiff out to north and west. Behind her the morning broadened, and overhead the fog gave place to blue sky, although the sun itself remained dun and dim behind the heavy wrack of grey obscurity that still overhung the straits and the Labrador coast. Ahead in the west, however, the fog went whirling away and was gone, until presently the sunlight struck all the wide expanse of sea into glittering radiance, with the enormous granite cliffs of Mansfield island forming a long blur against the western horizon. Off to the east and north the ice blink made shimmering response to the sunlight, and from the straits came the thunderous rumble and grind of ice-masses fighting for freedom beneath the fog-blanket.
Crawford wakened. He sat up, blinking at the sunlight, then stared at the running white crests all around, and laughed in sudden joyous remembrance.
“I’ll whip you yet, Moses Deakin!” he cried out exultantly. “No food, no rudder, no sail, no compass—yet I’ll whip you, sink me if I don’t! Ay, warlock or not, I may give you a fight—for the—Star——”
The words died on his lips as he swung about and swept his eager gaze along the horizon. For there, not a mile to the northeast and standing squarely for him out of the cloud-bank that still hovered low above the straits, was a fifty-gun ship—white canvas towering up into the sky as she leaned over and headed for him across the wind! Crawford stared at her all agape, incredulous, then leaped to his feet with a blaze of excitement in his blue eyes. The French ship! Iberville! As he stood, thus, leaning to the thrust of the boat and staring, the emerald jewel came out from beneath his shirt; he replaced it with fumbling fingers, and a laugh broke on his lips.
“The Star of Dreams, eh? There lies the ship Deakin saw in his vision, and it seems that I’m destined to meet Iberville again. Did Deakin see the Star Woman also?”
He had no answer to this query, but meet Iberville he did, half an hour later, when he clambered up the side of the Pelican frigate and struck hands with the eldest of the famous Le Moyne brethren. Young Bienville, boy in years yet wearing man’s uniform, stood beside Iberville, and greeted Crawford with a cry and a hearty embrace.