Within half an hour he was aboard the ship, and had bargained for a spare berth in the forecastle with the crew. He would be compelled to rough it, and remain as dirty and disheveled as possible until the ship reached Buenos Ayres. Obviously, no matter what his personal wrongs might be, he could not make the captain of the Southern Cross a party to the escape from Cartagena of the man who had nearly succeeded in ridding the republic of its president.
But the prospect of hard fare and worse accommodations did not trouble him at all. He had nearly ten thousand dollars in his pockets. If the note sent through Lopez to the American Consul was acted on promptly, a further sum of fifteen thousand dollars lying to his credit in a local bank was now in safe keeping.
Really, considering that he had been so near death that morning, he had a good deal to be thankful for if he never saw Cartagena or the Los Andes ranch again.
As for the marriage, what of it? A knot so easily tied could be untied with equal readiness. He hadn’t the least doubt but that an American court of law would declare the ceremony illegal.
At any rate, he could jump that fence when he reached it. At present, in sporting phrase, he was going strong with a lot in hand.
He kept well out of sight when a government launch came off, and a port official boarded the vessel.
He never knew what a narrow escape he had when the chief steward who acted as purser, was asked if any new addition had been made to the passenger list. The ship’s officer was not a good Spanish scholar. He thought the question applied to the cargo, and answered “no.”
Then, after a wait that seemed interminable, the snorting and growling of a steam winch and the unwilling rasp of the anchor chain chanted a symphonic chorus in Maseden’s ears. Those harsh sounds sang of freedom and life, of golden years on a most excellent earth instead of an eternity in the grave. He came on deck to watch the Castle of San Juan dwindle and vanish in the deep, blue glamour of a perfect tropical night.
He was standing on the open part of the main deck, close to the fore hold, when he heard English voices from the promenade deck high above his head.
A man’s somewhat querulous accents reached him first.
“Well, at this time two days ago, I little thought I’d be on a steamer going south to-night,” said the speaker.
There was no answer, though it was evident that the petulant philosopher was not addressing the silent air.
“I suppose you girls are still mooning about that fellow getting away from the Castle?” grumbled the same voice. “I tell you he has no earthly chance of winning clear. Steinbaum will see to that. His record is none too good, and a question in the American Senate would just about finish him, even in San Juan. So Mr. Philip Alexander Maseden might just as well have been shot yesterday morning as to-day or to-morrow. They’re hot on his track now, Steinbaum told me —
“Eh? Yes, I know he did me a good turn, but, damn it all, that was merely because he was going to die, not because he was a first-rate life for an insurance office. It was no business of mine that he and Suarez couldn’t agree… Oh, let’s go to our cabins! Tears always put my nerves on a raw edge! Anyone would think you had lost a real husband on your wedding day!”
There was a movement of shadowy forms. Maseden thought he could distinguish a woman’s white hand rest for an instant on the ship’s rail. Was that the hand he thought he would remember until the Day of Judgment? He could not say.
The one fact that lifted itself out of the welter of incoherent fancies whirling in his mind was an almost incontrovertible one. If his ears had not deceived him, he and his unknown but lawful wife were fellow-passengers on board the Southern Cross!
CHAPTER IV
“FIND THE LADY”
A slight mist hung over the sea – sure outcome of the tremendous range of the thermometer between noon and midnight in a tropical clime. The sky was cloudless, and the stars clustered in myriads.
Though the Southern Hemisphere falls far short of the glory of the north in constellations of the first magnitude, the extraordinary clearness of the upper air near the equator enhances the stellar display. It would almost seem that nature knows she may veil her ample splendors in the north, but must make the most of her scantier charms in the south.
Maseden, swinging on his heel in sheer bewilderment, suddenly found himself face to face with the Southern Cross, hanging low above the horizon. Had an impossible meteor flamed forth from the familiar cluster of stars and shot in awe-inspiring flight across the whole arc of the heavens northward to the line, it would not have surprised him more than the discovery that his “wife” was on board the ship.
That was a stupendous fact before which the whirl of adventure of the long day now drawing to a close subsided into calm remoteness.
“Madeleine,” the woman he had married, was his fellow-passenger! He would surely see her many times during the voyage to Buenos Ayres! He would hear her voice, which he could not fail to recognize.
She, on her part, would probably identify him at the first glance. How would she handle an extraordinary situation? Would she claim him as her husband, repudiate him scornfully, or utterly ignore him? He could not even guess.
There was no telling what a woman would do who had elected to marry a man whom she had never met, whose very name, in all likelihood, she had never heard, merely because he happened to be a prisoner condemned to speedy death.
Yet she could not be a particularly cold-blooded person. She had wept for him, had whispered her heartfelt grief; had promised to pray for and think of him always. Even the man with the high-pitched voice of a hypochondriac – presumably, from the manner of his address, her father – had hinted that her suffering had already passed the bounds set for one who, to serve her own ends, had gone through that amazing ceremony.
Maseden did not actually marshal his thoughts thus clearly. If compelled to bend his wits to the task, he might have spoken or written in such wise. But an active brain has its own haphazard methods of weighing a new and distracting problem; it will ask and answer a dozen startling questions simultaneously.
In the midst of Maseden’s strange and formless imaginings the ship’s course was changed a couple of points to the southward, and the Southern Cross was shut out of sight by the forecastle head. Then, and not until then, did the coincidence of the vessel’s name with that of the constellation occur to his bemused wits.
He laughed cheerfully.
“By gad!” he said, “all the signs of the zodiac must have clustered about my horoscope on this 15th of January. When I get ashore I must find an astrologer and ask him to expound.”
The sound of his own voice brought a belated warning to Maseden of the folly he had committed in speaking aloud.
There was no other occupant of the fore deck at the moment. A look-out man in the bows could not possibly have overheard, because of the whistling of the breeze created by the ship’s momentum and the plash of the curved waves set up by the cut-water, and it was highly improbable that words uttered in a conversational tone would have reached the bridge.
But behind him rose the three decks of the superstructure, and there might be eavesdroppers on the promenade deck or in one of the two dark gangways running aft.
He glanced over his shoulder to right and left. Apparently he had escaped this time. No matter what developments took place in the near future, he was by no means anxious as yet to reveal his nationality. Each hour brought home, more and more forcibly, the misfortune of the chance which left him no alternative but the shooting of Suarez that morning.
The act was absolutely essential to his own safety, but it put him clearly out of court. At any rate, the authorities of no South American state would listen to a recital of his earlier wrongs. If, as was highly probable, a sensational account of the attempted assassination of the new president had been tacked on to the telegrams