"You can do it?" he had asked softly. "Remember, the papers you carry will mean big money if you get through."
Still no answer.
"It is easy," went on Mr. Dainopoulos. "You do not change your course, that is all. Keep on. East-southeast."
Captain Rannie was perfectly well aware of all this, but he lacked the superficial fortitude to discuss it. He kept his head averted while his employer was speaking, his long wrist with the slave-bangle hanging over his knee. Change his course! That phrase had two meanings, by Jove! And his course was east to China, as soon as he could collect. He could do it. Talking about it to a man who was making fifty times, a hundred times, more than himself, was horrible to him.
He had got up suddenly and put on his hat, harassed lest this sort of thing should bring bad luck, for he was superstitious. At the back of his mind lay an uneasy fear lest that girl business should spoil everything. Who could foresee the dangers of having a woman on the ship? His ship! He, who could not bear to go near them at all, who treated even elderly creatures with brusque discourtesy! It would bring bad luck.
And now at last he was slipping through the nets, bound out upon a voyage of almost dismaying possibilities. It was a voyage of no more than thirty-six hours. Captain Rannie shivered and stood suddenly stock still by the binnacle as he thought of what was to transpire in those thirty-six hours. Could he do it? He was beginning to doubt if he could. He said to the helmsman:
"Keep her south and three points east," and went into the little chart room.
The Ægean Sea is a sea only in name. It could be more accurately described as a land-locked archipelago. Emerging from any of the gulfs of the mainland, gulfs which are nearly always narrow and reëntrant angles with walls of barren and desolate promontories, one can proceed no more than a few hours' steaming on any course without raising yet more promontories and the hulls of innumerable islands. Closed to the southward by the long bulk of Crete lying squarely east and west like a breakwater, it presents its own individual problems to the navigator, the politician, and the naval commander. The last named, indeed, was finding it anything but a joke. The very configuration of the coastline, which rendered a sally from the Dardanelles a feat of extraordinary folly and temerity, made it a unique hiding place for the small craft who slipped out of Volo and emerged from the Trikari Channel after dark. Submarines, coming round from Pola, could run into rocky inlets in the evening and would find immense stocks of oil, in cans, cached under savage rocks up the ravines of almost uninhabited islets of ravishing beauty. Gentlemen in Athens, in a hurry to reach Constantinople, took aëroplanes; but there was another way, across the Ægean Sea, in small sailing ships which were frequently blown out of their course at night and would take refuge in Kaloni, whence it was easy to reach the mainland of Asia Minor. And this business—for it was a business—was so profitable, and the ships of war so few in proportion to the area, that it went on gaily enough "under our noses" as one person said in disgust. Not quite that; but the problem did not grow any simpler when there was yet another neutral government—with ships—at Saloniki, a government that might be almost hysterically sympathetic to the cause of freedom and justice but which might also be imposed upon by conscienceless and unscrupulous merchants already in collusion with other unscrupulous people in Constantinople. This was the situation when the Kalkis turned the great headland of Karaburun and headed south-southeast on the journey from which she never returned. Captain Rannie, staring at the chart on which he had pencilled the greater part of her course, southeast from Cape Kassandra, bearing away from the great three-pronged extremity of the Chalcidice peninsula, was aware that she would not return, but he found himself flinching from the inevitable moment, drawing nearer and nearer when he must face success or failure. When he asked himself, echoing Mr. Dainopoulos, could he do it? He was not sure that he could.
From this reverie he was roused by Mr. Spokesly appearing on the bridge. For a moment he was almost betrayed into a feeling of relief at the approach of a companion. He opened his mouth to speak and Mr. Spokesly, standing by the door, stopped to listen. But nothing came. Captain Rannie knew the secret power of always letting the other man do the talking on a ship. He said nothing. He crushed down the sudden craving to confide in Mr. Spokesly. He wanted—just for a moment—to call him in, shut the door, and whisper, with his hand on Mr. Spokesly's shoulder, "My boy, we are not going to Phyros at all. We are going to...."
No, he stopped in time. Why, he might stop the engines, blow the whistle, run the ship ashore! He stepped out beside Mr. Spokesly who was looking down at the compass, and wrote some figures on the slate that hung in view of the helmsman.