He laughed cheerfully.
“By gad!” he said, “all the signs of the zodiac must have clustered about my horoscope on this 15th of January. When I get ashore I must find an astrologer and ask him to expound.”
The sound of his own voice brought a belated warning to Maseden of the folly he had committed in speaking aloud.
There was no other occupant of the fore deck at the moment. A look-out man in the bows could not possibly have overheard, because of the whistling of the breeze created by the ship’s momentum and the plash of the curved waves set up by the cut-water, and it was highly improbable that words uttered in a conversational tone would have reached the bridge.
But behind him rose the three decks of the superstructure, and there might be eavesdroppers on the promenade deck or in one of the two dark gangways running aft.
He glanced over his shoulder to right and left. Apparently he had escaped this time. No matter what developments took place in the near future, he was by no means anxious as yet to reveal his nationality. Each hour brought home, more and more forcibly, the misfortune of the chance which left him no alternative but the shooting of Suarez that morning.
The act was absolutely essential to his own safety, but it put him clearly out of court. At any rate, the authorities of no South American state would listen to a recital of his earlier wrongs. If, as was highly probable, a sensational account of the attempted assassination of the new president had been tacked on to the telegrams announcing the coup d’état in San Juan, and he, Maseden, were painted as a desperado of mark, it might even be feared that the settled and respectable Argentine Republic would arrest him and endeavor to send him back to San Juan for trial.
Of course, the United States Consul in Buenos Ayres would have something to say about it, but there was a very real danger of consular efforts being overruled. No matter how distasteful the rôle, Philip Alexander Maseden must continue to masquerade as Ramon Aliones, vaquero, until he could leave the ship and assume another alias.
It was soon borne in on him how narrow was the margin which still separated him from disaster. He had gone to his berth, an unsavory hutch next to a larger cabin tenanted by deck-hands, when the door was thrust wide (he had left it half open while undressing, there being no electric switch within) and a lamp flashed in his eyes.
A short, stockily-built man, whom Maseden rightly took for the captain, stood there, accompanied by another man, seemingly a Spanish steward.