His face was suddenly reddened, beneath the veneer of tan. But the boyish joy with which he rushed for Fenton was a heartening thing to see.
The two simply gripped, with might and main, and hammered each other with one free hand apiece, and laughed, and called one another astonishing names till it seemed they might explode.
"You savage! You tough old Redskin!" Fenton finally managed to articulate, distinctly. "If it isn't yourself as big as life! And I want you to know I haven't made your fortune—not exactly—yet—but it's certain at last. And how about your winning my little girl? Speak up, you caveman of the—— Oh, Elaine!"
But Elaine had fled the scene.
That moment began the tug at the ties of friendship and the test of the souls of the three. It was not a time of happiness that thereupon ensued. Elaine avoided both the men as far as possible. Grenville alone seemed natural, and yet even his smiles were tinged with the artificial.
He was glad to relate their varied adventures—the tale of the perils through which they had finally won. But how much of it all Gerald Fenton really heard no man could with certainty tell.
Fenton was neither a self-conceited person nor a blind man, groping through life. Through the stem of his finely colored calabash he puffed many a thought, along with his fragrant tobacco fume, and revolved it in his brain.
Between certain lines of Grenville's story he read deep happenings. That Sidney had saved and preserved Elaine, and battled for her comfort and her very life, against all but overwhelming odds, was a fact that required no rehearsal.
Mere propinquity, as Fenton knew, has always been the match-maker incomparable, throughout the habited world. Add to the quite exceptional propinquity of a tropic-island existence a splendid and unfaltering heroism in Grenville, together with a mastery of every situation, months of daily service and devotion, and the rare good looks that Sidney had certainly developed—and what wonder Elaine should be changed?
The change in her bearing had struck him at once at the moment of their meeting by the stairs. He had never got past that since. When at length his course was clearly defined and his resolution firmly fixed, it still required skillful maneuvering on Fenton's part to manage the one little climax on which he finally determined.