At the gates Sard stopped, saying to himself that he must go back and warn the woman. “That boy does not believe,” he said; “he thinks me daft; and she is in danger. And beside all that, I must speak to her. I must ask her if she be that one; for I believe she is: I believe she must be. And yet she cannot be Juanita: the name and everything else is changed. Her brother thought me mad when I asked if he were Spanish. Yet she was like enough to her: and then there was my dream. Changed or not, I must know, one way or the other; and besides, she must be warned. She is older and wiser than this boy and she must be warned of the danger.”
He knew very well that if he went back, he would meet a Hilary convinced of his madness and not speak to Miss Kingsborough, yet he half turned. As he did so there came from the anchorage far behind him, yet very clearly, a beating of the Pathfinder’s bells as though for a fire. In an instant’s hush after the stopping of the bells there was a shout, which he heard but could not distinguish, followed by three roaring cheers. He knew what it was. The Pathfinder, being about to sail, was cheering all the ships in port. The cheering was followed by a carillon of bells and a thunder of cheering as both anchorages made reply.
“There it is,” Sard muttered, “I have twenty minutes before they man the windlass. I’m due on the fo’c’sle-head to see the anchor grow. I’ll do it yet.”
He might have done it, no doubt, but when he reached the iron gates, his bicycle was gone.
PART TWO
Hilary Kingsborough returned to his sitting-room to think over what Sard had said.
“I didn’t half like that fellow’s looks,” he muttered. “If there are thieves about, he might well be their advance agent come to spy out the land. Besides, kidnapping ladies is simply not done. What rot! It isn’t easy to hide a dead body, but as for a living one, it’s out of the question. How are they going to get a living woman out of Las Palomas against her will, either by land or sea? They can’t do it.”
He walked to the window to look out at the port. “All the same,” he said, “old General Martinez may have heirlooms and things put away here. Burglars might have got wind of them, perhaps. I’ll lock up carefully to-night.”
He stood at the window, looking out at the glow. The coast mailboat was at her buoy from San Paulo. She was the Otoque that was to take him down the coast on her return journey the next day. The launches ground and hove about her gangway, while the slings of crates swayed up, poised, swung and jolted down among cries and clanking. There was a run of sea in the harbour which had not been there that afternoon; launches squatting on to it under way split it white. A sort of swell seemed to be coming into the harbour from the north. His thoughts were of Sard: but he could not help noticing the swell. “It is all rubbish,” he said. “Someone at the Club has sent that fellow here for a rag. These things do not happen. This is one of that bounder Coghill’s rises. He is always planting rags on people. What an ass that I was not to see it at once! Now that fellow will be at the Club telling how he scared me. Then at midnight, I suppose, they will serenade us with firecrackers and expect us to let them in and give them cocktails. Well, they will not get.”