dawn, still overcast, but with rain hardly more than a fine misty drizzle, the Voyageur plowed into Queensport harbor, swept past grim old Fort Jefferson, and slowed toward the long pier of the Ionic Yacht Club—the pier whence she had sailed on the strangest of her many cruises.
With her tender in tow, she came alongside the pier, eased to the stringpiece, and stopped, as engineer Hazeltine tossed a cable over a mooring pile.
“Go below now, and stay there!” commanded Wingate, from where he stood beside the seaman at the wheel.
“Yes, sir,” the engineer replied. “I will, as soon as I get another hawser over, aft. But it ain't right, sir. I tell you I had nothing at all to do with any trouble between you and the captain, sir!”
“No argument, now!” snapped Wingate. “Get that other hawser over, and look sharp! Then go below!” He gestured eloquently with the revolver in his hand. “It's no use for either of you to try to help Jaccard, or to untie him. I'll shoot the first man that sticks a nose out of that companionway! Get a move on, there! Jump!”
When the engineer, grumbling vain pleas of innocence, had vanished below, Wingate turned to the seaman.
“Go up to the clubhouse and tell the manager to phone for a couple of policemen in a hurry. If the manager's asleep, wake him up, and send him to me! Look alive!”
“Yes, sir,” replied the seaman, not in the least understanding what it was all about, but too hard-boiled to care much one way or the other. This sort of thing was all in the day's work for him.
He leaped to the wharf and departed at a rolling trot, while Wingate remained grimly on guard, his watchful eye covering the companionway.
An all but deserted city Queensport seemed, at that pallid hour. Few people were visible, except a handful of negroes shuffling along toward a near-by cotton press, a black man driving a mule cart over the cobbles of Harbor Street, and an aged huckster already wheeling his barrow with the sonorous cry:
“Raw craib! Raw shrimp! Get yo' shrimpy raw!”
Wingate gave no heed to anything but the companionway. With his gun ready for business, he stood guard.
If ever any morning dawned on a hard-looking character, it was now. His bare head was all a tousle of wet hair. His face was deeply lined with strain and exhaustion. A scraggle of nearly a fortnight's beard gave him the air of a extraordinarily disreputable vagabond. His flannels—soaked, wrinkled, and shrunk, stained with dirt and ink, rain-washed to motley hues—made him a kind of grotesque scarecrow.
But, withal, a healthy color showed in his cheek, so far as there was room for any color to show. His eye was keen, alert, normal. He had become a wholly different man from the cringing, snarling wreck that had sailed—it seemed ages ago—under the lash of morphine addiction—out of Queensport harbor.
The miracle of all miracles had happened. Wingate, not only cured of morphinism, but hating the accursed drug more bitterly than he hated the devil's self, stood there master of his yacht and of himself, once more a man!
In a matter of five minutes the sailor came rolling back and swung aboard.
“Police coming?” demanded Wingate.
“I dunno, sir; but the manager, he didn't want to phone for 'em. He give me this here letter for you.”
The man extended a sealed envelope.
Wingate took it with mounting anger.
“What the deuce does the man mean by refusing to obey me—me, a club member?” he growled. “What's the idea of writing me a note, when I want the police?”
He thrust the gun into his pocket, ripped open the envelope, and read:
Wingate stared at this, thunderstruck. A score of questions seethed in his brain. What could it mean? How could his wife know anything of what had happened? Where was she? In Queensport? And if in Queensport, why?
Hard on the heels of all this, a taxi swooped up to the club and a woman got out and ran down the driveway toward the wharf. She wore a little red toque and a raincoat; and if ever a woman looked agitated, it was this one.
“Good God!” cried Wingate, his heart giving a great leap. “Constance! You—here?”
$he laughed unsteadily as she reached the wharf. Forgetting all about the companionway, Wingate climbed over the rail, jumped to the stringpiece, and ran to meet her.
“Constance! What's the meaning of all this?”
“Are you all right, Marty? Tell me you're quite all right!”