For Jacinta

He stopped with some abruptness, but though she shivered, Muriel looked at him with steady eyes.

"Ah!" she said, "you mean he will either be better, or that no doctor could cure him then?"

Macallister made her a little inclination, and it was done with a grave deference that Jacinta had scarcely expected from him.

"Just that," he said. "I'm thinking ye are one of the women a man can tell the truth to. It is a pity there are not more o' them. It is no a healthy country Mr. Austin is going to, but I have been five years on the coast o' it, and ye see me here."

"I wonder," said Jacinta, "whether you, who know all about ships and engines, did not feel tempted to go with Mr. Austin?"

The engineer smiled curiously. "Tempted!" he said. "It was like trying to be teetotal with a whisky bottle in the rack above one's bunk; but I am a married man, with a wife who has a weakness for buying dining-room suites."

"Dining-room suites! What have they to do with it?"

"Just everything," and Macallister sighed. "She will only have the biggest ones the doors will let in, and she has furnished a good many dining-rooms altogether. Ye will mind that we lived here and there and everywhere, while she's back in England now. Ye would not meet a better woman, but on £20 a month ye cannot buy unlimited red-velvet chairs and sideboards with looking-glasses at the back o' them."

Jacinta laughed as she rose. "You will tell Mr. Austin we are sorry we did not see him."

"I will," and Macallister stood up, too. "Perhaps ye mean it this time, and I'm a little sorry for him myself. There are men who get sent off with bands and speeches and dinners to do a smaller thing, but Mr. Austin he just slips away with his box o' dynamite and his few sailormen."

He stopped and looked hard at her a moment before he turned to Muriel. "Still, we'll have the big drum out when he brings Mr. Jefferson and the Cumbria back again, and if there's anything that can be broken left whole in this ship that night it will be no fault o' mine."

They went out and left him, but Jacinta stopped when they came upon the man he had ejected from his room, sitting on the companion stairway and smoking a very objectionable pipe. She also held a little purse concealed beneath her hand.

"You are going back with Mr. Austin to the Cumbria?" she said.

The man stood up. "In course," he said. "It's eight pound a month, all found, an' a bonus."

"Ah!" said Jacinta. "I suppose there is nothing else?"

The man appeared to ruminate over this, until a light broke in on him.

"Well," he said, "Mr. Jefferson does the straight thing, an' he fed us well. That is, as well as he could, considering everything."

Jacinta smiled at Muriel. "You will notice the answer. He is a man!" Then she held out a strip of crinkly paper. "That will make you almost a month to the good, and if you do everything you can to make things easier for the man who wants to get the Cumbria off, there will probably be another waiting for you when you come back again."

The man, who took the crinkly paper, gazed at it in astonishment, and then made a little sign of comprehension. "Thank you kindly, miss, but which one am I to look after special? You see, there's two of them."

Jacinta was apparently not quite herself that night, for the swift colour flickered into her face, and stayed there a moment.

"Both," she said decisively. "Still, you are never to tell anybody about that note."

The man once more gazed at her with such evident bewilderment that Muriel broke into a little half-audible laugh. Then he grinned suddenly, and touched his battered cap.

"Well, we'll make it – both," he said.

They went up the companion, and left him apparently chuckling, but Jacinta appeared far from pleased when she got into the waiting boat.

"That was to have gone to England for a hat and one or two things I really can't do without – though I shall probably have to now," she said. "Oh, aren't they stupid sometimes – I felt I could have shaken him."

In the meanwhile the man in the fireman's serge went back to Macallister's room.

"Give me an envelope – quick!" he said.

Macallister got him one, and he slipped a strip of paper inside before he addressed it and tossed it across the table.

"You'll post that. There's a Castle boat home to-morrow, and I'd sooner trust you with it than myself," he said, with a little sigh, which, however, once more changed to a chuckle.

"If there's money inside it ye're wise," said Macallister drily. "Still, what are ye grinning in yon fashion for?"

"I was thinking it's just as well I've only – one – old woman. It would make a big hole in eight pounds a month – an' a bonus – if I had any more of 'em. But you get that letter posted before I want it back."

"Wanting," said Macallister, reflectively, "is no always getting. Maybe, it's now and then fortunate it is so, after all."

It was two hours later, and Jacinta stood on the flat roof of Pancho Brown's house looking down upon the close-packed Spanish town, when the crash of a mail gun rose from the harbour and was lost in the drowsy murmur of the surf. Then the other noises in the hot streets below her went on again, but Jacinta scarcely heard the hum of voices and the patter of feet as she watched a blinking light slide out from among the others in the harbour. It rose higher and swung a little as it crept past the mole, then a cluster of lower lights lengthened into a row of yellow specks, and she could make out the West-coast liner's dusky hull that moved out with slanting spars faster into the faintly shining sea. Jacinta closed one hand as she leaned upon the parapet and watched it, until she turned with a little start at the sound of footsteps. She was, one could have fancied, not particularly pleased to see Muriel Gascoyne then.

"We were wondering what had become of you, and Mrs. Hatherly is waiting to go home," said the latter. Then she turned and caught a glimpse of the moving lights that were closing in on one another and growing dim again. "That must be the African boat?"

"It is. She is taking out six careless sailormen whose lives are, perhaps, after all, of some value to them."

Muriel looked at her, and wished she could see her face. "Every one of them may be of some value to somebody else."

"I suppose so," and Jacinta laughed curiously. "You obvious people are now and then to be envied, Muriel."

"If there is anything you would like to tell me – " and Muriel laid a hand upon her arm with a gesture of sympathy.

"There isn't. We all have our discontented fits, and mine is, no doubt, more than usually unreasonable since everything has turned out as I wanted it."

Then she rose and turned towards the stairway with a little laugh which Muriel fancied had a hint of pride in it. "I really don't think I would have had anything done differently, after all, and now I must not keep Mrs. Hatherly waiting."

CHAPTER XI

THE LAND OF THE SHADOW

It was towards the end of the afternoon when the skipper of the West-coast mailboat, peering through his glasses, made out two palms that rose apparently straight out of the sea. He watched them for some minutes, and then took their bearing carefully upon the compass, before he rang for half speed and called Austin to the bridge.

"That's your island, and we'll run in until I get under six fathoms," he said. "After that it will have to be the surfboat, and I fancy you will be very wet when you get ashore."

It seemed to Austin that this was more than probable, for although there was not an air of wind to wrinkle it, a long heave came up in vast, slow undulations out of the southern horizon, and the little mailboat swung over them with sharply slanted spars and funnel. She stopped once for a few moments while the deep-sea lead plunged from her forecastle, and then, with propeller throbbing slowly, crept on again. She had come out of her course already under the terms of the bargain Austin had made with the Las Palmas agent, for some of those steamers have the option of stopping for odd boatloads of cargo and passengers wherever they can be found along the surf-swept beaches, and since no offer he could make would have tempted her skipper to venture further in among the shoals, Austin had fixed upon that island as the nearest point of access to the Cumbria. He did not, however, know how he was to reach her when he got there.

In the meanwhile they were slowly raising the land, or the nearest approach to it to be found in that part of Africa, which consists of mire and mangroves intersected everywhere by lanes of water. It lay ahead, a grey smear streaked with drifting mist against which the palms that had now grown into a cluster rose dim and indistinct, and a thin white line stretched between themselves and it. The skipper appeared to watch the latter anxiously.

"There's considerable surf running in on the beach, and I'm a little uneasy about my boat," he said. "I suppose it wouldn't suit you to go on with us, and look for a better place to get ashore to-morrow?"

"No," said Austin, decisively. "I'm far enough from where I'm going already, and one would scarcely fancy that there are many facilities for getting about in this country."

The skipper made a little gesture of resignation. "That's a fact," he said. "Well, I can't go back on the agent, but if the boat turns you and the boys out before you get there you can't blame me."

Austin laughed. He had got many a wet jacket, and had once or twice had to swim for it, in the surf of the Canary beaches, though he was quite aware that there are very few places where the sea runs in and breaks as it does on the hammered coast of Western Africa. Indeed, as he watched the blur of steamy mangroves grow clearer, and the filmy spouting increase in whiteness, he could have fancied that nature, in placing that barrier of tumbling foam along its shore, had meant it as a warning that the white man was not wanted there. The air was hot and heavy, the sky a dingy grey, the sea a dim, slatey green, and there came off across the steep heave a dull booming like the sound of distant thunder.