The doctor was quite right; the cool air did revive him amazingly. He felt feverish, and paced up and down the deck, a prey to the bitterest thoughts that ever tortured a man's soul.
One by one the stars came out in the great blue arch overhead, and mirrored themselves in the bluer waters.
Varrick watched them in silence, his heart in a whirl. All at once it occurred to him that he knew the pilot of the boat—that, as he was from Montreal, it wouldn't be a bad idea to interview him as to the location of some private asylum to which he might take Gerelda.
He acted upon this thought at once, and making his way to the upper deck, he recognized the man at the wheel, in the dim light, although his back was turned to him.
"How are you, John?" he exclaimed, tapping him on the shoulder. "Don't let me frighten you; it is your old friend Varrick."
Much to his surprise, the pilot neither stirred nor spoke. Varrick stepped around, and faced him with some little laughing remark on his lips. But the words died away in his throat in a gasp. The dim light was falling full upon the pilot's features. What was there in that ashy face and those staring eyes that sent the cold blood back to his heart?
"John!" he cried, bending nearer the man and catching hold of his arm roughly as it rested upon the wheel. But his own dropped heavily to his side.
The terrible truth burst upon him with startling force—the pilot was dead at the wheel!
But even in the same instant that he made his horrible discovery, a still greater one dawned upon him. Another steamer came puffing and panting down the river, signaling the "St. Lawrence."
Each turn of the ponderous wheels swept her nearer and nearer, and the "St. Lawrence" was drifting directly across her bow. It was a moment so feighted with horror it almost turned Varrick's brain. Five hundred souls, or more, all unconscious of their deadly peril, were laughing and chattering down below, and the pilot was dead at the wheel!