“You talked of puttin’ up some guy to pretend to marry us.”
“Forget it. We can’t keep her insensible or dumb for days. But, in the company of her loving father and her devoted husband, what can she do? Who will believe her? Depend on me to have the right sort of boys on the ship. They’ll just grin at her. By the time she reaches Costa Rica she’ll be howling for a missionary to come aboard in order to satisfy her scruples. You can suggest it yourself.”
“I believe she’d die sooner.”
“What matter? You only lose a pretty wife. There’s lots more of the same sort when your wad is thick enough. Why, man, it means a three-months’ trip and a fortune for life, however things turn out. You’re tossing against luck with an eagle on both sides of the quarter.”
Fowle hesitated. The other suppressed a smile. He knew his man.
“Don’t decide in a minute,” he said seriously. “But, once settled, there must be no shirking. Make up your mind either to go straight ahead by my orders or clear out to-night. I’ll give you a ten-spot to begin life again. After that don’t come near me.”
“I’ll do it,” said Fowle, and they shook hands on their compact.
It was not in Winifred’s nature to remain long in a state of active resentment with any human being. A prisoner, watched diligently during the day, locked into her room at night, she met Rachel Craik’s grim espionage and Mick the Wolf’s evil temper with an equable cheerfulness that exasperated the one while mollifying the other.
She wondered greatly what they meant to do with her. It was impossible to believe that in the State of New Jersey, within a few miles of New York, they could keep her indefinitely in close confinement. She knew that her Rex would move heaven and earth to rescue her. She knew that the authorities, in the person of Mr. Steingall, would take up the hunt with unwearying diligence, and she reasoned, acutely enough, that a plot which embraced in its scope so many different individuals could not long defy the efforts made to elucidate it.