Again Jerome was eager to voice his sentiments in this connection, and again the Captain, perceiving his eagerness, chose to hold him in a torment of unreleased speech. “I presume,” he drawled, “you’re anxious to get home after your life-and-death struggle with the Dark Angel—h’m?” There was a smile on Utterbourne’s lips, a smile of chilly, faint derision, since, so far as he was concerned, the Dark Angel was at liberty to pause on his threshold whenever the impulse prompted; he would be ready, without question or prayer. “But, as a matter of fact,” he resumed, “I expect to reach San Francisco myself maybe sooner than Curry and his songbirds—or at any rate not very much later. If you care to consider the Mediterranean business at all, but feel you’d rather not run the risk of reaching home a week, a day, or even an hour later, then go on tomorrow with Curry, and I’ll get in touch with you afterward. H’m? If, on the other hand, you’d like to come along with us now, I could perhaps lay a sort of ground-work in your mind between here and San Francisco, which might facilitate matters in case it developed that we wanted to get things under way rather quickly.”
“I think,” said Jerome (permitted at last to speak) with a voice he tried hard to keep perfectly steady, “that I’ll run the risk!” His eyes sparkled a little. “Would you like me to sleep on board tonight? I’d hate like the devil to wake up somewhere else and find all this was only a dream!”
Then Utterbourne laughed. That is to say, he shouted. And when Jerome was gone, he sat in the dark on deck a long time, smoking one cigarette after another, and gently humming _To a Wild Rose_ at intervals.
Jerome couldn’t wait till morning to break the news to Curry, but got the impresario out of bed. There were new lines of worry and care in the good man’s face, but his enthusiasm over the offer which had been made his erstwhile business manager was wholly unfettered. At first he blinked sleepily, and said: “Well—well....” in a somewhat solemn, deliberating way. But when he woke up sufficiently to realize that it wasn’t for advice but for congratulation that the business manager had roused him, then Curry became satisfactorily boisterous. In fact, they both became a little boisterous, for Jerome had smuggled in sandwiches and a bottle of something, and insisted upon an impromptu celebration right on the spot.