Slyne had drawn back a step. One of his hands fell on the haft of a flogging-hammer that some one had left lying loose on the casemate there. Had it not been for the proximity of the pilot, drowsing away the time till morning in the chart-house behind, he would most assuredly have attempted to knock the old man on the head with it. He felt sure that, but for Captain Dove, he could have managed Sallie now that Yoxall was out of the way. He stood gnawing savagely at his lower lip as she vanished along the deck in the darkness. He had taken no notice at all of her timid good-bye.
Captain Dove grinned spitefully at him through the gloom of the small hours. "You'd better be off below and pack up," the old man suggested. "You'll be going ashore as soon as we get pratique."
"But—I'll be back. Give me time to turn!" Slyne snarled at him. "A bargain's a bargain, and—I'll be back."
"You'd better not," Captain Dove advised in a very ominous voice, and went on his way below, leaving Slyne to his own aggrieved, embittered reflections.
To Jasper Slyne the past few days had been like a foretaste of purgatory. Captain Dove had interdicted all communication with Sallie, and had proved a most unpleasant companion himself throughout the unspeakably wearisome passage from the North-west African coast, a passage made at the poorest speed of the ship because coal was scarce and he was afraid to call anywhere by the way to fill up his bunkers. Amid the dire squalor and discomfort, the enforced inaction and loneliness of life under such conditions, Slyne's only solace had been the hope of finally winning Sallie, by fair means or foul. He who, in his time, had met and made love to so many charming adventuresses, who would not have thought any more about her had she been one of their sort, had become absolutely obsessed by ambitions to be fulfilled with her for his wife.
And now—he knew that neither force nor finesse would avail him against Captain Dove's ultimatum. He had not the cash to meet the old man's demands, and that was apparently the end of the matter.
Most men, in Slyne's place, would have owned themselves beaten then. But not so he. Thinking it all over again, he would admit to himself no more than that he was for the moment baffled by contrary circumstances; circumstances such as had been his lot for so long that he could contemplate them almost unmoved. It was his happy creed that in the very face of failure itself one may, as often as not, discern the inspiriting features of final success. The dark hour that heralds dawn he spent pacing the cluttered quarter-deck of the Olive Branch in the cold, his far-away eyes always fixed on the twinkling dock-lights, his almost bloodless lips straight and compressed under his black moustache, cudgelling his brains for some safe means of immediately obtaining the money he wanted.
He had not the cash to meet Captain Dove's demands. But neither was he so entirely penniless as Captain Dove supposed him. He had only a hundred dollars in hand, but he had twenty thousand francs at his credit in a French bank. Many a millionaire had risen to affluence from infinitely smaller beginnings.
But it would have been idle to offer Captain Dove any such trifling sum on account of the price he had set on Sallie. And, rack his own overworked wits as he would, Slyne could think of no safe plan for turning his modest capital over at a sufficient profit within the time at his disposal.
"The only possible way," he told himself finally, his teeth set, "the only possible way is to chance my luck at those cursèd tables again. Although, God knows that's a risk I'd give up anything else to avoid. But—it's the only possible way now," he repeated vexedly, recalling the very excellent reasons he had for never showing his face in Monte Carlo again.