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Horble sank at the first shot, and received the second kneeling. Then he toppled backward, and lay in a twitching heap against the drawers below the bunk, groaning and coughing. Gregory, with averted face, gave him another shot behind the ear, and another through the mouth, and then went out, sick and faint, shutting the stateroom door behind him. He sat for a long time beside the table, absolutely spent, and still holding the revolver in his hand. He was shaking in a chill, though the temperature was over eighty, and the cabin, when he had first entered it, had seemed to him overpoweringly hot and stifling. He warmed himself with a nip of gin. He looked over his clothes for a trace of blood, and was thankful to find none. He took off his coat; he examined the soles of his shoes. No blood! Thank God, no blood!

He went on deck and cast the revolver overboard, standing at the taffrail and watching it sink. Even in the time he had been below the wind had risen; it was blowing great guns to seaward, and the lagoon itself was white and broken as far as the eye could reach. Aboard his own schooner they were busy housing the topmasts, and the yeo-heave-yeo of straining voices warned him that Cracroft was hoisting in the boats and making everything snug.

Gregory leaned against the wheel and tried to think. To throw Horble’s body overboard would be to accomplish nothing. The blood, the shot holes, the disordered cabin, would all betray him. To scuttle the schooner with a stick of dynamite was a better plan, but that involved returning to the Northern Light, with the possibility of Madge coming off in the interval and discovering the murder for herself. No, the risk of that appalled him. Besides, whatever happened, he had another reason for keeping the truth from Madge. The fact of Horble’s death, even if she thought it accidental, would shock her to the core. It was inconceivable that she would feel anything but horror stricken, whether she judged her former lover innocent or not. She might even undergo a terrible remorse. At such a moment how little likely she would be to give way to him! Of course she would refuse. Any woman would refuse. Every restraining influence would be massed against him. No, his only hope lay in getting her aboard his schooner and out of the lagoon before the least suspicion could dawn upon her. Once away, and it might be two years before she might even hear of Horble’s death. Once away, and the empty seas would keep his secret. Once away—-

He studied the weather with a new and consuming anxiety. How could he manage to get out at all, or pick a course through the middle channel! It was thick with coral rocks, and in a day so overcast the keenest eye aloft would be at fault. And outside, what then? By God! it was working up to a hurricane. To run before it would be courting death. Hove to, he would be cramped for room, with three big islands on his lee. In his lawless and desperate past he had taken many a fall with fortune; he was accustomed to weigh the danger of perilous alternatives; he knew what it was to hazard everything on his own vigilance and skill, and to bear with a sailor’s fatalism the throw of those dread dice on which his own life had been so often staked. But to stake Madge’s life! Madge, whom he loved so dearly! Madge, for whom he would have died! And yet there was something sublime in the thought of taking her in his arms and driving before the gale, the storm sails treble reefed on the bending yards, the decks awash from end to end, Madge beside him, the pitchy night in front, the engulfing seas behind; to swim or sink, to ride or smother, accepting their fate together, and, if need be, drowning at the last in each other’s arms.