“Don’t let him hurt us,” she gasped. “Oh, don’t!”
“Not now,” he reassured her. “Nicholas is finished. But you must help by doing exactly as I have told you. You’d better go on. It won’t be long, hardly three hours, until freedom.”
She laid her cold cheek against his face, while her arms crept round his neck. She said nothing; and he held her to him with a sudden throb of feeling. They stood for a moment in the deepening gloom, bound in a straining embrace, while the rats gnawed in the sagging walls of the store and the storm thrashed without. She reluctantly descended the stair, crossed the broken floor and disappeared through the door.
A sudden unwillingness to have her return alone to the sobbing menace of Iscah Nicholas, the impotent wraith that had been Lichfield Stope, carried him in an impetuous stride to the stair. But there he halted. The plan he had made held, in its simplicity, a larger measure of safety than any immediate, unconsidered course.
John Woolfolk waited until she had had time to enter the orange-grove; then he followed, turning toward the beach.
He found Halvard already at the sand’s edge, waiting uneasily with the tender, and they crossed the broken water to where the Gar’s cabin flung out a remote, peaceful light.
X
THE sailor immediately set about his familiar, homely tasks, while Woolfolk made a minute inspection of the ketch’s rigging. He descended to supper with an expression of abstraction, and ate mechanically whatever was placed before him. Afterward he rolled a cigarette, which he neglected to light, and sat motionless, chin on breast, in the warm stillness.
Halvard cleared the table and John Woolfolk roused himself. He turned to the shelf that ran above the berths and secured a small, locked tin box. For an hour or more he was engaged alternately writing and carefully reading various papers sealed with vermilion wafers. Then he called Halvard.