And I knew he was satisfied. She had seen him on the quarter of his own ship and he playing the game at which, the Bess under his feet, no living man could beat him; and in playing it he had brought her father and herself to freedom. It was for such moments he lived.
The night was fading. We could now see things close by. He took her hand and patted it. "Go below, child, and sleep in peace. You're headed for home. Look at her slipping through the white-topped seas, and when she lays down to her work—there's nothing ever saw the African coast can overhaul us. No, nothing that ever leaped the belted trades can hold her now, not the Bess—while her gear's sound and she's all the wind she craves for."
"I believe you, Captain." She looked over the roaring side. Long and loose and lean, she was [pg 150] lengthening out like a quarter-horse, and he was singing, but with a puzzling savageness of tone:
"Roll, you hunted slaver
Roll your battened hatches down—"
"Good-night, Captain." She turned to me. She was pale, but 'twas the pallor of enduring bravery. There was no paling of her dark eyes. Even darker were they now. "Good-night—" She hesitated. "Good-night, Guy."
"Good-night, Miss Shiela," and I handed her down the companion-way. At the foot of the stairs she looked up and whispered, "You must take care of that wound, Guy." And I answered, "No fear," and then her face seemed to melt away in a mist under the cabin lamp.
Astern of us the dawn leaped up. It had been black night; in a moment, almost, it was light again. I remembered what Captain Blaise had said of a sunset in Jamaica; but here it was the other way about—a purple, round-rimmed dish, and from a segment of it the blood-red salad of a sun upleaping. And pictured clouds rolling up above the blood-red. And against the splashes of the sun the tall palm-trees. And in the new light the signal flambeaux paling. And the white spray of the bar tossing high, and across the spray the white-belted squadron tacking and filling futilely.
[pg 151]