On this second night of the run the Duke of Dorset, sitting alone on the deck, put his hand into his pocket, took out the map that Caroline Childers had sent to him at Oban, tore off the strip at the bottom on which her name was written, pulled that strip deliberately to bits, and tossed the scraps of paper over into the sea. Then he arose, walked across the deck into the cabin of the navigating officer, and put the map down on the table before that officer.
"Lieutenant," he said, "how near is this point, marked here in ink, to the ship's course?"
The officer got out his charts, located the point, and made roughly an estimate of the distance.
"We pass this point, sir."
"On what day?" inquired the Duke.
"On to-morrow morning, sir," replied the officer.
"I thank you," replied the Duke of Dorset. "I wish to be put ashore there." Then he went out.
It is a theory that good fortune travels usually close on the heels of despair. The Captain of the Cleavewaive, as his boat ran south, verified that theory. The Duke of Dorset sat with him for the remainder of this night in his cabin, and in the smoke of it, the talk ran constantly on the wilderness. He was again, as under the sprinkling of some magic water, that primordial man of the wild, whom the Captain so extravagantly envied.
In the cabin, while the moon walked on the water, and the great swells slipped one over the other silently, and that sinister desperate wrestling went endlessly on, the Duke of Dorset charmed and thrilled this sailor with the soul of a Dakota. He led him, panting with fatigue, through the vast, silent forests of Lithuania, day after day, in a path cut down like a ditch by the hoofs of a hundred beasts, one following the other—beasts, that the hunter, now himself a beast, running with the rifle in his hand, his hair caked with dirt, his body streaming with sweat, his heart lusting to kill, could never gain on.
He led him, shriveling with thirst, down the beds of lost rivers, where there was no green thing, no thing with a drop of moisture, only the dull red earth baking eternally under a sun that stood always above it like a disk of copper.