Swiftly they worked, these men who had cause to remember the departed siren without great love, and they placed her, secured to a grating, across the thwarts of the dingey, to which the grating was in turn secured. Then, all prepared, Peters sprang into the boat, bored a score of auger-holes in the bottom, and as the great red sun set fierce and blazing behind the black profile of the cliff, the filling boat was set adrift, straight down the path of the luminary, bound ever westward, until the sea gods claimed it and its passenger for their own.
"Farewell, place of ill-luck!" cried Pearce, as the schooner bore away before the rising evening breeze. "May I never set my eyes on such evil shores again."
"Then you will not come back to seek the treasure?" asked Venner, with a shadowy flicker of a smile.
"Not for a thousand times the treasure that lies there!" cried Pearse vehemently. "And I have seen it! The horror of this will haunt me until my dying day. I only hope God will look kindly upon that poor woman, that's all."
"I hope so, too," rejoined Venner thoughtfully. "With a white woman's opportunities, what a woman she could have been."
But the gods are inscrutable. Only the warm mantle of the setting sun gave a hint that Dolores might be even now entering into a place of eternal rest, where her sins of ignorance and untutored instincts would not count too heavily against her. The sea is very benign to its elect; a calm sea in the setting sun received Dolores in arms of infinite benignity.