But the woman laughed defiantly, tensely; laughed derisively, full in the bearded face.
“You have waited too long, Henry,” she said, evenly yet with a note of triumph in her tone; “I’ve worn threadbare every allurement of life. Today I came here seeking my last adventure—a sensation at once new and ultimate—death!”
It was here that the miracle supervened.
Chagrin, fierce and awful, distorted the hairy vagabond’s face, and, balancing himself precariously in the crazily whirling dugout, he raised a great clenched fist. I once had seen a laughing man struck by lightning. As the rending voltage shot through him the muscles of his face had relaxed slowly, queerly, as if from incredulity, just as the furious, drawn face of Henry Fayne relaxed now. The menacing fist unclinched and fell limply at his side.
Of all the examples of thwarted vengeance I had ever seen on the stage, or off, this episode from real life was the most dramatic.
The boat had circled swiftly in to the center of the vortex and now spun crazily for a moment as though on a fixed pivot, like a weather-vane. Then it capriciously resumed its first tactics, only it now raced inversely in a rapidly widening circle, running well down in the water, as though from some powerful submarine attraction.
That the spurious boatman was a victim of some hopeless form of insanity I was certain when I saw him drop to his knees and extend both his great hands in evident entreaty to the woman who had stripped him of his honor and, driven him, a driveling idio-maniac, into exile. Leanor sat impassive, but the madman continued to supplicate.
Never did my credulity undergo so mighty a strain as when, after a moment, the woman reached out and locked her slim hands in his. It was a strange picture, believe me! From my uncertain perch on the slimy ledge of slate, I stared, thrilling deep in my being at this futile truce on the brink of eternity.
Its revolutions greatly widened and its speed diminished, the tiny boat suddenly swerved from its circular course, bobbed upward as though a great weight had been detached from its keel and then drifted like some spent thing of life toward the west wall, where I crouched dumbfounded, my breath hissing in my nostrils, my lungs heaving.