He knew now that the accused officer had pitched his defense upon an accusation of the deserter and the refugee’s eyes smoldered as he learned that he himself had been charged with prefacing his flight with murder. He knew what that meant. The disgraced officer would move heaven and earth to clear 50 his smirched name, and the condition precedent would be the capture of Private Grant and the placing of him in the prisoner’s dock. To be wanted for desertion was grave enough. To be wanted both for desertion and the assassination of his company commander was infinitely worse, and to stand in that position and face, as he believed he would have to, a conspiracy of class feeling, was intolerable.
Haunting the shadowy places about Manila, Grant had been almost crazed by his fears but with the lifting of the steamer’s anchor, a great spirit of hope had brightened in him, feeding on the solace of the thought that, once more in the States, he could lose himself from pursuit and vigilance.
Then he had seen, on the same ship, the face of the man whom, above all others, he had occasion to fear!
For their joint lives the world was not large enough. One of them must die, and in the passion that swept over him with the dread of discovery. Grant had skirted a relapse into his recent mania.
At that moment when Spurrier had looked down and he had looked up, the deserter had seen only one way out, and that was to kill. But when the other had moved away, seemingly without recognition, his thoughts had moved more lucidly again.
Until he had tried soldiering he had known only the isolated life of forested mountains and here on a ship at sea he felt surrounded and helpless—almost timid. When he landed at San Francisco, if his luck held him undiscovered that long, he would have dry land under him and space into which to flee.
The refugee had hated Comyn. Now Comyn was dead and Grant transferred his hatred from the dead 51 captain to the living lieutenant, resolving that he also must die.
The moment to which he looked forward with the most harrowing apprehension was that when the vessel docked and put her passengers ashore. Here at sea a comforting isolation lay between first and third cabin passengers and one could remain unseen from those deck levels that lay forward and above. But with the arrangements for disembarkation, he was unfamiliar, and for all he knew, the steerage people might be herded along under the eyes of those who traveled more luxuriously. He might have to march in such a procession, willy-nilly, over a gang-plank swept by a watchful eye.
So Private Grant brooded deeply and his thoughts were not pretty. Also he kept his pistol near him and when the hour for debarkation arrived he was ripe for trouble.
It happened that a group of steerage passengers, including himself, were gathered together much as he had feared they might be, and Grant’s face paled and hardened as he saw, leaning with his elbows on a rail above him and a pipe in his mouth, the officer whom he dreaded.