The mask still covered his face; evidently he had forgotten it. He was looking back upon her with an expression she could not fathom, for the reason that she could not see through the mask; but his attitude was kindly, if one can see kindness in the mere figure of a person.
Then he went out and closed the door softly behind him. For one, two, three, four, five seconds of time Bessie did not move. She counted them in order that she might make no mistake; and she waited that length of time lest the man might repent of his hasty departure and decide to return.
Then, at the end of the five seconds, she raised the revolver from under the folds of her dress and leveled it at the closed door.
She maintained that position while she counted ten more, and if the rover had opened the door during that time she would have shot him. She did not know that, when arrayed in the costume he was then wearing, he wore a steel breastplate under his shirt which would have turned her bullet just as it turned Kane’s, earlier in the evening.
But now fifteen seconds had elapsed since the pirate left her. A full quarter of a minute, and she leaped to her feet and darted toward the door. There was no ordinary lock upon it, but there was a chain-bolt, and this she at once slipped into place.
That done, she breathed a sigh of relief; and then, with an added shiver, she looked hastily around to discover if there were other means of entrance to the palatial cabin in which she was now a prisoner.
Farther aft there were portières over a doorway, and she hurried to it, but only to discover that it was the means of communication with a passage from which four staterooms opened.
There was no other way out of the cabin save through the door used by the pirate; Bessie convinced herself of that at once, and with untold relief. Then she peered into the staterooms, one after another, and she discovered with alarm that one of them was all too plainly the abode of the corsair.
And then, when she would have made further investigation, she heard the rattle of the chain on the door she had fastened, and she tiptoed her way across the cabin until she stood almost against it, listening. The pirate had returned. She knew he was there, although, from the position she occupied almost behind the door, she could not see him. After a moment, during which she knew that he turned and gave a low-toned order to some person who was standing near him, he called her by name.
“Miss Harlan!” he said. “Miss Harlan!”