"A slight overdraft on the future—it's no more than that," remarked Mr. Jobling a little later, as if he had been alone, and Slyne looked round at him for an instant, with nostrils curled in a faint, superior smile.
Slyne thought he could guess some part at least of the troubles afflicting his chance acquaintance, and was very little inclined to hear more about them. He was too busy considering his own plan of campaign, the blood in his own veins was running too briskly under the stimulus of that wild flight through the keen night air, to waste any time or thought on another man's worries. But—a fellow-feeling makes us wondrous kind. "Cheer up!" said he suddenly. "Every one overdraws more or less on his luck, at one time or another. If that's all you've done, it's nothing to mope about."
Mr. Jobling sat up with a start, and stared at him. "That's all," he asserted, a little too hurried in his assurance. "I give you my word, sir...." And then he recollected himself and laughed uncomfortably, confused.
"I've been thinking aloud," said he. "But you mustn't take any notice of that. It's a bad habit of mine. And, as you say, we all overdraw on the future, from time to time. As a man of the world, sir, you'll understand what I mean to convey to you. And of course these little overdrafts are always met when they're due.
"What a fine night this is for a fast spin!"
"What's the nature of your present overdraft?" Slyne inquired perversely, safe in the certainty that the other could not resent that rudeness, and was again amused by Mr. Jobling's cough of discomfiture.
But, "Purely metaphorical," that gentleman countered cleverly. "We'll soon be in San Remo at this rate. I wouldn't wonder if we've established a record. It isn't every day there's such a car in the market."
"No, it isn't," Slyne agreed. "Nor a buyer for it." And conversation languished again.
But Slyne's spirits, none the less, were steadily rising as he drew nearer, mile by mile, to the chief temple of that goddess of chance to whom he looked to befriend him now—since it was not on his own behalf alone that he was seeking her shrine, since mischance must entail consequences so dire to Sallie as well as to him. The personal risk he was running lent added zest to the piquancy of his most unusual position as a champion of maidenhood in distress. And what Sallie's fate would be if his own luck failed him, he could picture in vivid detail from his own experience of a world most men know nothing about.
Within a few days the Olive Branch, with a supply of cheap coal and some makeshift repairs, would be gone from Genoa, leaving behind no trace but such bills as Captain Dove could escape without paying. She would enter Port Said and leave Suez in some effective disguise and under another assumed name which would last her through the Straits of Bab-el-Mandeb; beyond which she would disappear, perhaps for good, into whatever strange world she might raise over the mysterious sea-rim which lies beyond "the Gate of the Place of Tears."