You are to imagine with what consternation and dismay this accident fell upon us. For many minutes together no man spoke a word to another. Such a deathly silence came upon the ship that our own act and judgment might have brought this awful disaster, and not the play of capricious change. To say that the men were afraid is to do them less than justice. In war time, it is the earliest casualties which affright the troops and send the blood from the bravest faces. Our good fellows had gone into this adventure with me thinking that they understood its risks, but in reality understanding them not at all. The truth appalled them, drove challenge from their lips and laughter from their eyes. They were new men thereafter, British seamen, handy-men who worked silently, methodically, stubbornly as such fellows ever will when duty calls them. Had I suggested that we should return immediately to Europe they would have broken into open mutiny on the spot. Henceforth no word of mine need advocate my work or ask of them true comradeship. I knew that they would follow me to the ends of the earth if thereby they might avenge their shipmate.
“Larry,” I said, “the blame of that is upon me. God forgive my rashness. I feel as though my folly had cost me the life of one of my own sons.”
“Sir,” was his answer, “you had no more to do with it than the King himself. I will not hear such talk. The chances are the same for all of us. It might have been yourself, sir.”
McShanus was no less insistent.
“’Tis to do our duty we are here,” he said. “If there is a man among us who is ashamed of his duty, let us be ashamed of him.”
I did not answer them. The seamen, awakened from their trance, ran to the help of a comrade long past all human help. Far away over the waters, the Diamond Ship still fired her impotent shells at us. Their very impotency convinced me how surely an accident had killed poor Holland. I said that it had been the will of God, indeed, that one should perish on the altar of our justice, and his life to be the first sacrifice to be asked of us. In my own cabin, alone and bitterly distressed, a greater depression fell upon me so that I could ask myself why I had been chosen for the part at all or how it befell that of the thousands who had been robbed of Valentine Imroth, the Jew, I, alone, must set out to discover him. Vain, indeed, did triumph appear now. We had defied the rogues and they had answered us—not with a final answer, truly, but with that hush and awe of death which is never so terrible as upon the lonely waste of the great silent ocean.
Nor was the hour to pass without further news of them. Impotent at the guns, they fell to words, rapped out by our receiver so plainly that a very child of telegraphy could have read them.
“The message of Valentine Imroth to the Englishman, Fabos.—I take up your challenge. Joan Fordibras shall pay your debt in full.”
CHAPTER XXIV.
DAWN.