The Dark Star

No, he could not congratulate himself on his cleverness and wisdom;

sheer accident had saved his skin--and once the complex and

unaccountable vagary of a feminine mind had saved him from

annihilation so utter that it slightly sickened him to remember his

position in Ilse Dumont's stateroom as she lifted her pistol and

coolly made good her boast as a dead-shot. But he forced himself to

take it lightly.

"Good Lord!" he thought to himself. "Was ever a man in such a hellish

position, except in melodrama? And what a movie that would have

made! And what a shot that girl proved herself to be! Certainly she

could have killed me there at Brookhollow! She could have riddled me

before I ducked, even with that nickel-plated affair about which I was

ass enough to taunt her!"

Lying in his chair, cheek on arm, he continued to ponder on what had

happened, until the monotonous vibration no longer interfered with his

inclination for a nap. On the contrary, the slight, rhythmic jolting

soothed him and gradually induced slumber; and he slept there on the

rushing train, his feet crossed and resting on the olive-wood box.

* * * * *

A hand on his arm aroused him; the sea wind blowing through the open

doors of the mail-van dashed in his face like a splash of cool water

as he sat up and looked around him.

As he descended from the van an officer of the freight packet greeted

him by name; a sailor piled his luggage on a barrow; and Neeland

walked through the vista of covered docks to the pier.

There was a lively wind whipping that notoriously bad-mannered streak

of water known as the English Channel. Possibly, had it been

christened the French Channel its manners might have been more polite.

But there was now nothing visible about it to justify its sentimental

pseudonym of Silver Streak.

It was a dirty colour, ominous of ill-temper beyond the great

breakwater to the northward; and it fretted and fumed inshore and made

white and ghastly faces from the open sea.

But Neeland, dining from a tray in a portholed pit consecrated to the

use of a casual supercargo, rejoiced because he adored the sea, inland

lubber that he had been born and where the tides of fate had stranded

him. For, to a New Yorker, the sea seems far away--as far as it seems

to the Parisian. And only when chance business takes him to the

Battery does a New Yorker realise the nearness of the ocean to that

vast volume of ceaseless dissonance called New York.

* * * * *

Neeland ate cold meat and bread and cheese, and washed it down with

bitters.