paul ran straight from the poop into the eyes of the daphne. there the trail of gas led him. it was the coal in the fore hatch that had been exposed and wet. he went below through the chain locker, but only to remain a second. a sulphurous wave of heat drove him on deck, choking for breath. a furnace was back of it. there was no fire to be seen, but this man did not have to see it to know what the blast that repulsed him meant. he knew these australian coal cargoes too well. this was not the result of the mutineers' abortive effort to destroy the daphne. this was a fire of spontaneous combustion. it was deeply seated. these coals had been in the bark more than one hundred and sixteen days to his own knowledge, which was drawn from the log and the time since he had boarded her. how long she had lain in sydney after being loaded there was no way of telling.
coals of this kind, laden in hulls like the daphne's, which were never built for such cargoes, generate gas after a certain period, and unless watched incessantly and ventilated properly fire is the certain result. the pacific deeps hold the secret of many a ship brought to her doom through such a lading.
that night the constant northwesterly summoned a new freshness to its drive as if it sensed the daphne's peril. when paul relieved emily at the wheel at seven o'clock she was crying with the pain in her arms. she had been standing there a full five hours. not since they had been sailing to the eastward had paul permitted her to take a trick beyond two hours. she had to walk up and down the deck swinging her arms and flexing her fingers to get the numbness out of them.
"emily, i'd suffer any pain to take yours away," paul said. "i feel like a whipped cur to see you going through all this terror and hardship—and to think i can't do anything to put any of it away from you."
his tenderness flooded her eyes with tears. strife always brought him close to her.
"don't, paul, please," she said bravely, attempting to control her voice. "you will—you will have me breaking—going to pieces in a moment."
she put her hands to her face and leaned against the casing over the steering gear.
"emily, i want you to get for'ard and get a bite to eat and then turn in," he said. "i'm going to try to let you sleep for three hours—maybe until midnight. i've everything battened down forward. the fire's all there. not a sign aft—no temperature. it's this wind and our strength against the beast that's under decks."
he did not tell her what a beast he knew it to be.
the morning of the fifth day after the discovery of the fire paul fixed the daphne's position one hundred and fifty miles to the south and west of san francisco.
"only another day, partner! maybe an hour may bring a vessel to us!" she had just relieved him at the wheel. through these five days the daphne had come driving without sighting a sail: unspoken save by the voice of the northwest wind. once they had seen the black smoke plume of an outward-bound steamer, but it was too far away for the daphne's signal of distress to be seen.
paul seemed to be living by will alone: to be endowed of a force that only death could stay. when he slept the gold woman had no idea. he had relieved her at the wheel every two hours, night and day, but when she was steering she frequently heard him at work in the engine room. from the very first night he had slept beside that engine, kept its fires alive and a stream of steam flowing into the forehold through a pipe led down through the chain locker. he had explained to her that water on a fire like this would have been of as little use as oil: that gases had to be smothered.
emily sensed that a greater danger menaced them than paul had revealed. this had been suggested to her when on the second day she had seen him finish a raft built of doors and forecastle bunkboards. but she had learned of the storm not to ask questions. what this man chose to tell he would tell.
never had he seemed more splendid than as he stood before her this morning telling the daphne's position, and in the same breath whispering again the belief that had come to him the night before that the steam was choking the beast in the hold. bare-armed, bareheaded, lithe with a thoroughbred's suppleness, he was, in her sight, an urn of the divine fire from which mankind draws its noblest impulses.
"we'll win through yet, paul! in justice we must!" she called to him as he went forward.
she saw him come to the galley door a few minutes later with a cup of steaming coffee and, as he ate of a biscuit and drank, he waved to her. he darted inside and a moment later came running aft with a cup for her.
"i've had my coffee, dearheart," she said.
"half a dozen cups won't hurt you. i put two spoons of sugar in this—sand, save the mark."
with that he was gone from her again. emily watched him breaking coal out of a corner of the main hatch for use in the donkey. she smiled as she remembered his commentary on the grimness of stealing coal from one end of the ship to make fire to put out coal already afire in the other end. it was the old, old principle of fighting fire with fire in a new, weird form.
watching her partner drew emily's attention from the daphne. a warning slat of the weather leech of the to'galluns'l brought her eyes back to the bark and the compass. she had just succeeded in getting the vessel on her course of northeast again, when a roar with a shriek whistling through it came bursting aft. a cloud of steam poured from the engine room door.
shrieking paul's name, emily paused but a second when no answer came. she became a flame of action. with the quickness of thought and the instinct of his training guiding her hands, she snapped the wheel into its beckets, let the spanker sheet go by the run and, leaping forward, cast the halyards off their pin.
only belching steam answered her cry of paul. into it she hurled herself. it flung her back. she became as a tigress at the repulse. she was not to be denied. instinct brought her to her hands and knees. it told her to go in under the scalding vapor. just inside the door she found her own and snatched him into the life-giving air.
when paul awoke to consciousness fifteen minutes later it was to find the face of the gold woman bending over him. he put up his arms and drew her face down against his hot lips and held it there.
"you, you," he murmured, and he found the precious lips which had kissed him again and again in his unconsciousness. they answered him as if they would breathe the strength of immortal life into his form.
"not even death can take you from me!" she cried, and started up savagely. she might have expected to find the grim specter himself to grapple at her side.
"not even—death——"
lavelle sighed and his eyes closed in a seeming weariness of pain. his arms fell from her neck.
"oh, god, you mustn't take him from me! you must not!"
it was an appeal, a command, a challenge of defiance. the cry with which she sent it heavenward pierced above the roar of the steam and the warring sails and hamper above.
although this lone woman's extremity was great, yet of her association with paul lavelle she had learned to order her wits in the presence of disaster.
"if the next minute seems to be the last, just keep on fighting—hammering ahead," he had said to her so many times.
she remembered how he had given strychnine to mcgovern to stimulate heart action—the oil he had put on the poor fellow's burns. she ran aft and in a drawer in the medicine chest which she looted of bandages and lint she discovered by accident a bottle of brandy. when she returned to paul he was just opening his eyes again. he shook his head at the liquor when he had taken but a sip of it.
"some starch and water," he whispered, "or glycerine. there's some aft——"
emily found a bottle of glycerine. a few minutes after he had swallowed a mouthful of it he nodded that he felt easier.
"steam—afraid it got inside," he whispered. "tried—remember keep my mouth shut. steam's bad to swallow. water injector—on the boiler—blew out. hit me somewhere in the middle. happened all in a second."
he fainted while emily was drawing the boot off his left leg which he had indicated hurt him most. the limb was scalded from the knee down. his arms and the backs of his hands, too, were blistered. his face was grimed with ashes and soot, but when emily washed it she found it free of burn or hurt. the while her loving hands swathed him and soothed his wounds she crooned like a wild thing over its whelp.
when he revived she was holding his head in her lap just as she had in the cambodia's boat. his eyelids lifted to her kisses. he put up a hand and touched her cheek and she patted it. he smiled at the reassurance that it was not a dream. many, many times he had awakened to put out his hand like that—to touch that face and met only emptiness.
the jade ring which he had put on emily's finger drew his glance and held it for a second.
"'man has many reckonings with man, but only one with god,'" he repeated. "'only one with god.'"
the escaping steam by this time had spent its strongest volume. it was now no more than a hiss. the daphne had fallen off before the wind again and the noise aloft had practically ceased.
"i feel this is the reckoning, partner," he whispered.
with a sob she bent and kissed him with all the passion of her being.
"and for the touch of those lips," paul went on, "the reckoning—cannot be too hard."
"no, no, dearheart——no, no! this is not the reckoning—only the beginning of the future."
paul shook his head.
"i have thought of the future, but it can't be—for me. if things had been different i should have found you though you had been at the ends of the world. and i should have come for you and taken you." a flash of the old conquering spirit lit his eyes. "i should have taken you despite a world against me. it is part of the—the reckoning that we should—have met; like strange ships on the sea and to have sailed together for this little while. but it wasn't to be that we were to get home together. and that is right. that is right."
"paul, paul, this hopelessness is not like you. you will live! you must live!"
"but i don't want to live," he answered very calmly. "i am nothing but a worthless, broken thing—marked among men. i haven't even a name to give you. i am a pariah man—darling. that's——"
"listen, paul—look up at me so that you will know that it is my soul speaking to you. all that fortune has given me is as nothing to just the glance with which you are looking up at me now. all that i have is yours—my soul, my flesh, my blood, my every breath, my life! had you nowhere to lay your head i would follow you. had you only rags to cover me i would wear them as robes of state. had you only a crust from the gutter to share with me it would be a feast. were the whole world to revile you its scorn would make me proud. i would wear its spittle like jewels. my love would be my crown."
emily granville was burning with the divine fire of a sublime love. her message to this man, who to her was more than all the earth and its treasures—more than life itself, burst from her lips with the passionate rush of a mountain stream seeking the ocean.
"can you not understand that my love would be a poor weak, despicable thing if this were not so? that i would not be worthy of my womanhood?"
she choked back the tears as she asked these questions; she kissed the face which she pressed against her breast.
"that you might live—i would die with a smile and with but one regret: that it had not been permitted to me to bear a man child like you.
"but there is a future, paul. the world will not drive us forth. life—a fine, clean, god-fearing life is waiting for us over there—just through the golden gate. it is a golden gate which will close out the past—forever and ever."
"it cannot be locked out, dear."
"but it can. i can lock it out. the world must listen to me. it must believe me. justice works in strange ways, but it brought us that poor man out of the sea. i can tell the world his story. he was with you on the yakutat."
paul started and caught her hand.
"then, it was not a vagary," he whispered. "that was driscoll—the quartermaster."
"he was in the boat with you that night. i don't know what name you knew him by. but he told me what happened—the truth. had he never spoken i should have known the truth. if the world would not listen to you, it will listen to me! it will take back its lies! if——"
emily's voice broke and she lowered her head in the embrace of the wounded arms which encircled her neck. the pent-up tears of all her travail of spirit since their paths had crossed—the tears choked back and fought back through the dark hours of all the weeks that had gone—would not be longer stayed. on his breast she poured them, and her one thought was that if death must be her love's victor it would strike them quickly in each other's arms.
