"How the Seven Stars can I find out!" he demanded indignantly. "The trader I bought her from, along with a shipload of niggers for the Sultan of El Merayeh, when she was very little more than knee-high to me—and a pretty stiff price I paid for her, too, let me tell you!—had brought her from the other side of the Back o' Beyond that lies three months away behind the mountains of God-knows-Where. So much I found out from him one way and another, although he could speak no language that I'd ever heard before. And no one will ever be able to find out more. She's my property, by right of purchase. It wouldn't pay even her own father, whoever he is, to try to take her away from me."
"But where was it you ran across her?" asked Slyne, with somewhat too much eagerness. "Oh, all right. You needn't tell me any more than you want to. I'm not in the least inquisitive."
He lighted another cigar, and lay back in his seat as if he took no further interest in that strange story. But in his fertile brain he was seeking some way to turn it to his own advantage. And the obstacles before him merely made him the more determined. For the needy adventurer's restless mind was inflamed by dreams of the future he might achieve with a wife such as Sallie to help him, by the delusion that, once she was legally his, he would succeed in bending or breaking her will to his every wish.
In the smoke that hung about the skylight of the squalid, grubby little saloon, with its two evil-smelling, untended kerosene lamps overwhelming even the odour of two rank cigars, he saw golden, diamond-set visions of such a career as could only end at the very crest of that dazzling society amid which crowns nod in friendly fashion to coronets, which will, on occasion, open its doors as if hospitably to a man with money and brains and a tempting wife. Slyne had more than once in his palmier days strayed boldly over all boundaries into the outskirts of quite august circles, and felt assured that he was fitted to shine among even the most select.
While as for Sallie—he could imagine her at his side, tall and slender, in the very latest mode, but scarcely more than young girl yet, as lissom and shapely as any sculptor's divinest dream of Aphrodite, with her pure, proud, sensitive features faintly flushed under the scrutiny of the multitude to the complexion of a wild-rose at its prime; with her curved, crimson lips, drooped a little as though in appeal against the envious stare of the other women, questioning eyebrows, eyes with the wild wine of youth abrim behind their long, shadowy lashes, alive with strange, lambent lights, like twin rainbows born between sunshine and shower; and, over all, a glory of red-gold hair luridly aglow in the gleam of innumerable electroliers.
His own eyes hardened and narrowed again. A cock-roach crawling along a beam had brought him back to crude matters of fact.
"Does she know—what you've told me?" he tried afresh, with unconquerable persistence.
Captain Dove shook his head abstractedly, and then sat up with a scowl, realising too late that he had admitted more than was maybe wise.
"It doesn't make any difference, of course," said Slyne, to appease him, "since there's so little to know: and she doesn't seem much interested, does she? The upshot is that she's your property; there isn't a court in the world that could say otherwise. And no other claimant could prove his case.
"If you'll take a tip from me, though, you'll see that she and Yoxall don't give you the slip together some fine—" He halted, tongue-tied under the old man's murderous glance.