Somewhere out of sight he knew that Tom Mowbray's eyes were open. The third match fired and he had the door by the handle. It restored him like a grip of a friendly hand.
He was able to pause in the door while the match burned and his mind raced. There leaped to the eye of his imagination the two stricken figures he had seen slinking from the house, the weeping of the woman, the muffled tap of the man's crutch. There followed, in an inevitable sequence, the memory of them in their torment as they sat at meat with Tom Mowbray.
"I wonder which o' them done it?" he thought, and shuddered. Where he stood he could see the still face of the dead man, with its shape of power and pride overcast now by the dreadful meekness of the dead. He could not pursue the thought, for another came up to drive it from his mind.
"Supposin' somebody woke and come out and saw me here!"
To think of it was enough. Drawing the door to behind him he went down the stairs. He had been careless of noise in ascending; now each creak of the warped boards was an agony. The snorer had turned over in bed; the awful house had a graveyard stillness. He held his breath till he was clear of it and again in the hushed and empty street.
"The Etna for mine, if I can make it," he breathed to himself as he went at a run in the shadow of the silent houses. "God! If anyone was to see me!"
And thus it was that the first pallor of dawn beheld the incredible and unprecedented sight of an able seaman, with his clothes strapped upon his head, swimming at peril of his life in San Francisco bay, to get aboard of the "Hell-packet."
V
THE GIRL
The little mission hall showed to the shabby waterside street of Jersey City its humble face of brick and the modest invitation of its open door, from which at intervals there overflowed the sudden music of a harmonium within. Goodwin, ashore for the evening, with the empty hours of his leisure weighing on him like a burden, heard that music rise about him, as he moved along the saloon-dotted sidewalk, with something of the mild surprise of a swimmer who passes out of a cold into a warm current. For lack of anything better to do, he had been upon the point of returning to his ship, where she lay in her dock. He had not spoken to a soul since he had come ashore at sundown, and the simple music was like a friendly prompting. He hesitated a moment for he was not a frequenter of missions then turned in at the entrance of the hall.