ere he
stood he could see the still face of the dead man, with its shape of
power and pride overcast now by the dreadful meekness of the dead. He
could not pursue the thought, for another came up to drive it from
his mind.

"Supposin' somebody woke and come out and saw me here!"

To think of it was enough. Drawing the door to behind him he went
down the stairs. He had been careless of noise in ascending; now each
creak of the warped boards was an agony. The snorer had turned over
in bed; the awful house had a graveyard stillness. He held his breath
till he was clear of it and again in the hushed and empty street.

"The Etna for mine, if I can make it," he breathed to himself as he
went at a run in the shadow of the silent houses. "God! If anyone was
to see me!"

And thus it was that the first pallor of dawn beheld the incredible
and unprecedented sight of an able seaman, with his clothes strapped
upon his head, swimming at peril of his life in San Francisco bay, to
get aboard of the "Hell-packet."

V

THE GIRL

The little mission hall showed to the shabby waterside street of
Jersey City its humble face of brick and the modest invitation of its
open door, from which at intervals there overflowed the sudden music
of a harmonium within. Goodwin, ashore for the evening, with the
empty hours of his leisure weighing on him like a burden, heard that
music rise about him, as he moved along the saloon-dotted sidewalk,
with something of the mild surprise of a swimmer who passes out of a
cold into a warm current. For lack of anything better to do, he had
been upon the point of returning to his ship, where she lay in her
dock. He had not spoken to a soul since he had come ashore at
sundown, and the simple music was like a friendly prompting. He
hesitated a moment for he was not a frequenter of missions then
turned in at the entrance of the hall.

The music of the harmonium and of the voices that sang with it seemed
to swell at him as he pushed open the swing door and tiptoed in
toward a back seat, careful to be noiseless. But there were heads
that turned, none the less heads of tame sailors from the ships, for
whose service the mission struggled to exist, and a few sleek faces
of shore folk; and, on the low platform at the upper end of the hall,
the black-coated, whiskered missioner who presided over the gathering
craned his neck to look at the new-comer, without ceasing to sing
with vigor. It was, in short, such a