“You’ll pledge your word to do no talking?” he said.
“Not a word, sir, and I’ll answer for my officers, too.”
“But the sailors?”
“Oh, they’ll talk, but nobody believes a sailor’s yarns, anyhow. I don’t know what you’ve been doing, but it’s clear that Uncle Sam wants you mighty bad. However, that’s none of my business. My job is to save my ship from confiscation or being blowed up. So is it to be surrender by wireless or the boat?”
Jarrold glanced at his niece. She came to his side and stood there proudly.
“Let it be the boat,” she said; and Jarrold nodded his head in silent assent. He seemed crushed and broken by the way in which fate had turned against him in the very hour of his triumph.
[CHAPTER XXXVII—THE IRONY OF FATE]
The Tropic Queen moved majestically through a sapphire sea. It was a perfect tropic night. A dream mist, like a scarf of shimmering, spangled vapor lay over the water. Above, the great, soft stars of the equatorial regions beamed from a sky like blue-black velvet. High above the main mast, like a great lamp, hung the full moon.
Disaster, danger and death seemed miles away, a contingency too remote to be considered. Yet they were close at hand, far closer than any of the sleeping passengers dreamed.
The bells chimed the hours and half hours as they slipped by to the steady threshing of the propeller, and the wake of the big ship spread fan-like from her stern in a milky stream that flashed with luminous phosphorescence.