It lasted for many seconds, that mute and motionless duel, then very suddenly from a wholly unexpected quarter there came an interruption. Columbus, sensing trouble, pushed his stout person between the two men and leapt whining upon Dick, pawing at him imploringly with almost human entreaty.
It put an end to the tension. Dick looked down involuntarily and meeting the dog's beseeching eyes, relaxed in spite of himself. Saltash uttered a curt laugh and returned the revolver to his pocket.
"That settles that," he observed. "Columbus, my acknowledgments--though I am quite well aware that your eloquent appeal is not made on my behalf! You know what the little beggar is asking for, don't you?"
Dick laid a soothing hand on the grizzled head. "All right, Columbus!" he said.
Saltash's smile leapt out again. "Oh, it's all right, is it? I am to have a free pardon then for boosting you over your last fence?"
Again Dick's eyes came to him, and a very faint, remote smile shone in them for an instant in answer. Then, very steadily, without a word, he held out his hand.
Saltash's came to meet it. They looked each other again in the eyes--but with a difference. Then Saltash began to laugh.
"Go to her, my cavalier! You'll find her--waiting--on the _Night Moth_."
"For Columbus," said Saltash with his most derisive grin, and tossed Dick's hand away.
A chill breeze sprang up in the dark of the early morning and blew the drifting fog away. The stars came out one by one till the whole sky shone and quivered as if it had been pricked by a million glittering spear-points. The tide turned with a swelling sound that was like a vast harmony, formless, without melody, immense. And in the state-cabin of the _Night Moth_, the woman who had knelt for hours by the velvet couch lifted her face to the open port-hole and shivered.
She had cast her hat down beside her, and the cold night-wind that yet had a faint hint of the dawn in it ruffled the soft hair about her temples. Her face was dead-white, drawn with unspeakable weariness, with piteous lines about the eyes that only long watching can bring. She looked hopeless, beaten.
The shaded light that gleamed down upon her from the cabin-roof seemed somehow to hurt her, for after a second or two she leaned to one side without rising from her knees and switched it off. Then with her hands tightly clasped, she gazed out over the dim, starlit sea. The mystery of it, the calm, the purity, closed round her like a dream. She gazed forth into the great waste of rippling waters, her chin upon her hands.