Dextry growled sourly. “This country has plumb ruined you, boy. You think they’re all alike—an’ I don’t know but they are—all but this girl. Seems like she’s different, somehow—but I can’t tell.”
Glenister spoke musingly:
“I had an ancestor who buccaneered among the Indies, a long time ago—so I’m told. Sometimes I think I have his disposition. He comes and whispers things to me in the night. Oh, he was a devil, and I’ve got his blood in me—untamed and hot—I can hear him saying something now—something about the spoils of war. Ha, ha! Maybe he’s right. I fought for her to-night—Dex—the way he used to fight for his sweethearts along the Mexicos. She’s too beautiful to be good—and ‘there’s never a law of God or man runs north of Fifty-three.’ ”
They moved on, his vibrant, cynical laughter stabbing the girl till she leaned against the yawl for support.
She held herself together while the blood beat thickly in her ears, then fled to the cabin, hurling herself into her berth, where she writhed silently, beating the pillow with hands into which her nails had bitten, staring the while into the darkness with dry and aching eyes.
CHAPTER II
THE STOWAWAY
SHE awoke to the throb of the engines, and, gazing cautiously through her stateroom window, saw a glassy, level sea, with the sun brightly agleam on it.
So this was Bering? She had clothed it always with the mystery of her school-days, thinking of it as a weeping, fog-bound stretch of gray waters. Instead, she saw a flat, sunlit main, with occasional sea-parrots flapping their fat bodies out of the ship’s course. A glistening head popped up from the waters abreast, and she heard the cry of “seal!”
Dressing, the girl noted minutely the personal articles scattered about the cabin, striving to derive therefrom some fresh hint of the characteristics of the owners. First, there was an elaborate, copper-backed toilet-set, all richly ornamented and leather-bound. The metal was magnificently hand-worked and bore Glenister’s initial. It spoke of elegant extravagance, and seemed oddly out of place in an Arctic miner’s equipment, as did also a small set of De Maupassant.
Next, she picked up Kipling’s Seven Seas, marked liberally, and felt that she had struck a scent. The roughness and brutality of the poems had always chilled her, though she had felt vaguely their splendid pulse and swing. This was the girl’s first venture from a sheltered life. She had not rubbed elbows with the world enough to find that Truth may be rough, unshaven, and garbed in homespun. The book confirmed her analysis of the junior partner.