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.