‘You have named the programme,’ he answered. ‘I shall chase her. If I miss her I shall wait for her at Table Bay.’
‘She may get there before you,’ I said, ‘and be under way for another destination whilst you are still miles to the nor’ard.’
‘No,’ he cried hotly, ‘we shall be there first; but we shall not need to go so far. Her course must be our course, and we shall overhaul her; don’t doubt that.’
‘But put it,’ said I, ‘first of all, that you don’t overhaul her. You may pass her close on a dark night with never a guess at her presence. She may be within twenty miles of you on a clear, bright day, and not a creature on board suspect that a shift of helm by so much as half a point would bring what all hands are dying to overhaul within eyeshot in half an hour.’
He listened with a face clouded and frowning with impatience; but I was resolved to weaken if I could what seemed to me an insane resolution.
‘Count upon missing her at sea, for I tell you the chances of your picking her up are all against you. Well, now, you arrive at Table Bay and find that the “Shark” sailed a day or two before for some port of which nobody knows anything. What will you do then? How will you steer your “Bride”? For all you can tell, this man Hope-Kennedy may make for the Pacific Islands by way of Cape Horn, or he may head north-east for the Mozambique and the Indian waters, or south-east for the Australias. It is but to let fly an arrow in the dark to embark on such a quest.’
He lay back looking at me a little without speaking, and then said, in a more collected manner than his face might promise, ‘I may miss this man upon the high seas; I may find his yacht has arrived and gone again when I reach Table Bay; and I may not know, as you say, in what direction to seek her if there be no one in Cape Town able to tell me what port she has started for; but’—he drew a deep breath—‘the pursuit gives me a chance. You will admit that?’
‘Yes, a chance, as you say.’
‘A chance,’ he continued, ‘that need not keep me waiting long for it to happen. D’ye think I could rest with the knowledge that that scoundrel and the woman he has rendered faithless to me are close yonder?’ he exclaimed, pointing as though there had come a vision of the Atlantic before his mind’s eye, and he saw the yacht afloat upon it. ‘Who’s to tell me that before the month is out our friend the Colonel will not be drifting somewhere fathoms deep with a shot through his heart?’
‘If you catch him you will shoot him?’