"Maybe I will and maybe I won't," was the truculent rejoinder.
"Lord!" said Cleve, a vast discouragement in his tone. "You lay a course
as true and fine as a hair, and run afoul a rotting derelict in the
night!"
Flint laughed.
"Oh, I shan't make any trouble. I'll say my prayers regular until we make
shore finally. The agreement was to lay off the Cleigh booze. I brought on
board only a couple of quarts, and they'll be gone before we raise the
Catwick. But if I feel like talking to the woman I'll do it."
"It's your funeral, not mine," was the ominous comment. "You've been on
the beach once too often, Flint, to play a game like this straight. But
Cunningham had to have you, because you know the Malay lingo. Remember, he
isn't afraid of anything that walks on two feet or four."
"Neither am I--when I want anything. But glass beads!"
"That was only a lure for Cleigh, who'd go round the world for any curio
he was interested in."
"That's what I mean. If it were diamonds or pearls or rubies, all well and
good. But a string of glass beads! The old duffer is a nut!"
"Maybe he is. But if you had ten or twelve millions, what would you do?"
"Jump for Prome and foot it to the silk bazaar, where there are three or
four of the prettiest Burmese girls you ever laid your eyes on. Then I'd
buy the Galle Face Hotel in Colombo and close it to the public."
"And in five years--the old beach again!"
Flint scowled at the oily, heaving rolls, brassy and dazzling. He was
bored. For twelve weeks he had circled the dull round of ship routine,
with never shore leave that was long enough for an ordinary drinking bout.
He was bored stiff. Suddenly his thin lips broke into a smile. Cleve,
noting the smile, divined something of the impellent thought behind that
smile, and he grew uneasy. He recalled his own expression of a few moments
gone--the unreckoned derelict.
* * * * *
"Thank you for coming up," said Cunningham. "It makes me feel that you
trust me."
"I want to," admitted Jane.
A disturbing phenomenon. Always there was a quickening of her heart-beats
at the beginning of each encounter with this unusual gentleman rover. It
was no longer fear. What was it? Was it the face of him, too strong and
vital for a woman's, too handsome for a man's? Was it his dark, fiery eye
which was always reversing what his glib tongue said? Some hidden
magnetism? Alone, the thought of him was recurrent, no matter how
resolutely she cast it forth. Even now she could not honestly say whether
she was here to ask questions of Cunningham or of herself. Perhaps it was
because he was the unknown, whereas Denny was for the most part as
readable as an open book. The one like the forest stream, sometimes
turbulent but always clear; the other like the sea through which they
plowed, smooth, secret, ominous.