And the door was open. The doors to starboard and to port were both
open; and as the _Elsinore_ rolled a draught through the chart-house hall
my lungs filled with pure, cool air. As I drew myself across the high
threshold and pulled Margaret after me, from very far away I heard the
cries of men and the reports of rifle and revolver. And, ere I fainted
into the blackness, on my side, staring, my pain gone so beyond endurance
that it had achieved its own anaesthesia, I glimpsed, dream-like and
distant, the sharply silhouetted poop-rail, dark forms that cut and
thrust and smote, and, beyond, the mizzen-mast brightly lighted by our
illuminators.

* * * * *

Well, the mutineers failed to take the poop. My five Asiatics and two
white men had held the citadel while Margaret and I lay unconscious side
by side.

The whole affair was very simple. Modern maritime quarantine demands
that ships shall not carry vermin that are themselves plague-carriers. In
the donkey-engine section of the for'ard house is a complete fumigating
apparatus. The mutineers had merely to lay and fasten the pipes aft
across the coal, to chisel a hole through the double-deck of steel and
wood under the cabin, and to connect up and begin to pump. Buckwheat had
fallen asleep and been awakened by the strangling sulphur fumes. We in
the high place had been smoked out by our rascals like so many rats.

It was Wada who had opened one of the doors. The old steward had opened
the other. Together they had attempted the descent of the stairway and
been driven back by the fumes. Then they had engaged in the struggle to
repel the rush from for'ard.

Margaret and I are agreed that sulphur, excessively inhaled, leaves the
lungs sore. Only now, after a lapse of a dozen hours, can we draw breath
in anything that resembles comfort. But still my lungs were not so sore
as to prevent my telling her what I had learned she meant to me. And yet
she is only a woman--I tell her so; I tell her that there are at least
seven hundred and fifty millions of two-legged, long-haired,
gentle-voiced, soft-bodied, female humans like her on the planet, and
that she is really swamped by the immensity of numbers of her sex and
kind. But I tell her something more. I tell her that of all of them she
is the only one. And, better yet, to myself and for myself, I believe
it. I know it. The last least part of me and all of me proclaims it.

Love _is_ wonderful. It is the ev