e, man!" He ended with a gesture of appeal.

The place began to empty.

"Get him to my boat, then," acceded the captain. "Here, you fellows,
lend a hand. Come on, Doc." The man who had a ship at anchor was in a
hurry. "Don't whisper that I'm sailing; I can't carry all the people
that want to leave this town to-night. I've got to slip away. Hurry
up."

A quarter of an hour later, Herve stood at the mole with Rodman,
watching the row-boat that took the other trio out to the tramp
steamer, bound ultimately for France. Rodman seized his watch, and
studied its face under a street-lamp with something akin to frantic
anxiety.

"Where do you go, monsieur?" inquired the Frenchman.

"Go? God knows!" replied Rodman, as he gazed about in perplexity. "But
I've got to beat it, and beat it quick."

A moment later, he was lost in the shadows.

CHAPTER XIV

When Duska Filson had gone out into the woods that day to read Saxon's
runaway letter, she had at once decided to follow, with regal disdain
of half-way methods. To her own straight-thinking mind, unhampered
with petty conventional intricacies, it was all perfectly clear. The
ordinary woman would have waited, perhaps in deep distress and tearful
anxiety, for some news of the man she loved, because he had gone away,
and it is not customary for the woman to follow her wandering lover
over a quadrant of the earth's circumference. Duska Filson was not of
the type that sheds tears or remains inactive. To one man in the
world, she had said, "I love you," and to her that settled everything.
He had gone to the place where his life was imperiled in the effort to
bring back to her a clear record. If he were fortunate, her
congratulation, direct from her own heart and lips, should be the
first he heard. If he were to be plunged into misery, then above all
other times she should be there. Otherwise, what was the use of loving
him?

But, when the steamer was under way, crawling slowly down the world by
the same route he had taken, the days between quick sunrise and sudden
sunset seemed interminable.

Outwardly, she was the blithest passenger on the steamer, and daily
she held a sort of _salon_ for the few other passengers who were
doomed to the heat and the weariness of such a voyage.

But, when she was alone with Steele in the evening, looking off at the
moonlit sea, or in her own cabin, her brow would furrow, and her hands
would clench with the tensity of her anxiety. And