could have felt as he now did. It had all
come over him suddenly with a rush. When he talked with her at the hotel
in San Blanco he was filled with thoughts of his future, and assumed as
granted his footing upon her plane. How absurd, how ridiculous this
seemed now!

Why, why was it, he asked himself, that society or convention or whatever
it was had drawn the grim _chevaux de frise_ between those who had
accomplished, or whose forebears had accomplished for them, and those who
were yet to accomplish; with hosts eager to applaud the achievements of
finality, but who had no adequate encouragement for those who had yet to
achieve their mission, who fought their battles in the dark and won them
in the glorious light, or losing, sank back into that oblivion out of
which they had striven to emerge?

If fate had been different--yet if fate had been different he would never
have seen her, perhaps. Yes, he should be satisfied; he had seen his
star. And when it faded, as fade it must, in the vastness of the
dark--why, what then? Well, at least he had seen his star; even this
much is denied many. So, he would live it out and be thankful he had
been permitted to feel the great thrill--to know that at least he had the
heart for the greatest passion the world knows. Poor consolation, he
told himself with a grim smile. And yet he who hitches his chariot to a
star might well be content with less.

CHAPTER XI

THE BURNING OF THE "TAMPICO"

Just an hour later the _Tampico_ lay burning at a point in the Atlantic
where if the white lights of Cape Fear and Cape Lookout had converged
ninety-two miles farther out to sea they would have rested full on the
reeking hull.

Dan had been fearful of the results of Mr. Howland's policy in loading
the _Tampico_ with inflammable cargo. He had been reared with the fear
of fire in his heart. From one of his voyages his grandfather, Daniel
Merrithew, had never returned. A charred name board had told the grim
tale, and so Dan had gone out into the world with a long, red, flaming
line across his fate, as in knightly days a man might have included the
bar sinister or some other portentous device among his symbols of
heraldry.

Pacing the forward deck with his pipe, thinking deeply of his talk with
Virginia, Dan had seen pitch bubbling out of the deck seams and
spilling into rich black pools. And thus the fire was discovered--some
fifteen minutes too late, however, to effect the