is act.
He resented it. He knew he had done rightly, and she knew that she had
given offence by her involuntary sympathy with the suffering Chilean,
who, with the passing of the paralyzing shock of the bullet, was
howling dolefully now as the sailors carried him towards the forecastle.

The man's groans tortured her. Her eyes filled with tears. Joey,
yelping with frenzy, leaped up to invite her to lift him above the
canvas screen so that he might see what was going on. But Elsie could
only reach blindly for the rail of the companion-way, and Isobel, after
a smiling word of farewell to Courtenay, followed her.

So it came to pass that neither Stevenson nor the moon had power to
draw the captain of the _Kansas_ to the promenade deck that night.

CHAPTER II

WHEREIN THE CAPTAIN KEEPS TO HIS OWN QUARTERS

Doctor Christobal brought some additional details to the dinner-table.
He was not the ship's doctor. The _Kansas_, built for freight rather
than passengers, did not carry a surgeon on her roll; Dr. Christobal's
presence was due to Mr. Baring's solicitude in his daughter's behalf.
It chanced that the courtly and gray-haired Spanish physician had
relinquished his practise in Chile, and was about to pay a
long-promised visit to a married daughter in Barcelona. Friendship,
not unaided by a good fee, induced him to travel by the _Kansas_.

He had been called on to attend Mr. Boyle and the wounded Chilean, and
he reported now that the chief officer's injury was trifling, but the
Chilean's wound might incapacitate him during the remainder of the
voyage.

"So far as I can gather," he said, "Mr. Boyle had a narrow escape.
These half-breeds have a nice anatomical knowledge of the situation of
the lung; they also know the easiest way to reach it with a sharp
instrument. Captain Courtenay fired as the knife fell, otherwise our
first mate would have attended his own funeral this evening."

"What was the cause of the affair?" Isobel asked.

"The man is not one of the ship's crew, I understand. His name is
Frascuelo, and it appears that he was engaged to place some bunker coal
aboard early this morning. He says that he was drugged, and his
clothes stolen; that he came off to the ship at a late hour, and that
some one flung him headlong into a hold which, luckily for him, was
nearly full of cotton bales. He was stunned by the fall, and were it
not for Captain Courtenay's custom of having all hatches taken off and