the black shadow of a companionway as a figure crossed
beneath an electric overhead lamp far forward on the deck.

He waited.

The figure approached noiselessly.

It was the Duke! He was wearing slippers, with felt soles apparently,
for his steps caused no sound. Jarvis watched him with a strange
misgiving--a fear not for himself. Yet he deemed it wiser to wait for
developments.

Up and down the deck paced the nervous, noiseless figure. At last the
Duke returned and disappeared from view, through the door by which he
had entered the Kentuckian's view.

"I wonder what that meant?" thought Jarvis. "Perhaps he is having a
fight with his conscience--just as I have been doing."

And he watched the speeding waves, racing past the great vessel as it
seemed--for so steady was the swift advance of the ship that it seemed
they were on dry land, rather than the boundless expanse of the depths.

"Here I am--after all my education, all the work of years, to advance
myself, running away from my own country--an escaped gun-man, just like
an East Side thug."

In the comfortable calm of the shipboard life, with unfamiliar scenes,
away from the reminders of his tragedy at Meadow Green, it did not now
seem a fine thing that he had done.

Man is not normally a destroyer of his own kind--and his fine instincts
were asserting themselves. Yet, after all, despite his vow to his
father, this had been actual self-defense.

The other had fired the first shot: he had planned to trap him with a
decoy, and in the end it was survival of the fittest.

These thoughts had been frequently in his mind, but he had resolutely
driven them from him. Now they were nearing another port, a great
commercial cross-ways of the travel world. Here again he was coming
within the grasp of the law.

He was not too certain that all had been given up, in that questioning
pursuit of the Princess and her party. That broken door lock might yet
admit the hand of legal vengeance.

"And that Duke? He'll try to earn that five thousand dollars surely
enough now. Well, I'd better be worrying over my own future instead of
the dead past. They've said 'let the dead past bury itself, and don't
climb the graveyard fence.' That's good logic. But I'd better be
looking toward some of the fences ahead. I wonder what is on the
paper?"

He returned to his stateroom, where Rusty was dozing in a chair,
waiting for the good-night instructions.

Jarvis sat down and studied t