“I could have been decent, though, if I’d wanted to. Other fellows who were born and raised near me were decent enough. They got good jobs and stuck to them, and lived straight; but they made me sick—I looked down on them, and spent my time hanging around saloon corners rushing the can and insulting women—I didn’t want to be decent—not until I met you, and learned to—to,” he hesitated, stammering, and the red blood crept up his neck and across his face, “and learned to want your respect.”
It wasn’t what he had intended saying and the girl knew it. There sprang into her mind a sudden wish to hear Billy Byrne say the words that he had dared not say; but she promptly checked the desire, and a moment later a qualm of self-disgust came over her because of the weakness that had prompted her to entertain such a wish in connection with a person of this man’s station in life.
Days ran into weeks, and still the two remained upon their little island refuge. Byrne found first one excuse and then another to delay the march to the sea. He knew that it must be made sooner or later, and he knew, too, that its commencement would mark the beginning of the end of his association with Miss Harding, and that after that was ended life would be a dreary waste.
Either they would be picked up by a passing vessel or murdered by the natives, but in the latter event his separation from the woman he loved would be no more certain or absolute than in her return to her own people, for Billy Byrne knew that he “didn’t belong” in any society that knew Miss Barbara Harding, and he feared that once they had regained civilization there would be a return on the girl’s part to the old haughty aloofness, and that again he would be to her only a creature of a lower order, such as she and her kind addressed with a patronizing air as, “my man.”
He intended, of course, to make every possible attempt to restore her to her home; but, he argued, was it wrong to snatch a few golden hours of happiness in return for his service, and as partial recompense for the lifetime of lonely misery that must be his when the woman he loved had passed out of his life forever? Billy thought not, and so he tarried on upon “Manhattan Island,” as Barbara had christened it, and he lived in the second finest residence in town upon the opposite side of “Riverside Drive” from the palatial home of Miss Harding.
Nearly two months had passed before Billy’s stock of excuses and delay ran out, and a definite date was set for the commencement of the journey.
“I believe,” Miss Harding had said, “that you do not wish to be rescued at all. Most of your reasons for postponing the trip have been trivial and ridiculous—possibly you are afraid of the dangers that may lie before us,” she added, banteringly.
“I’m afraid you’ve hit it off about right,” he replied with a grin. “I don’t want to be rescued, and I am very much afraid of what lies before—me.”
“Before you?”
“I’m going to lose you, any way you look at it, and—and—oh, can’t you see that I love you?” he blurted out, despite all his good intentions.
Barbara Harding looked at him for a moment, and then she did the one thing that could have hurt him most—she laughed.
The color mounted to Billy Byrne’s face, and then he went very white.
The girl started to say something, and at the same instant there came faintly to them from the mainland the sound of hoarse shouting, and of shots.
Byrne turned and started on a run in the direction of the firing, the girl following closely behind. At the island’s edge he motioned her to stop.
“Wait here, it will be safer,” he said. “There may be white men there—those shots sound like it, but again there may not. I want to find out before they see you, whoever they are.”
The sound of firing had ceased now, but loud yelling was distinctly audible from down the river. Byrne took a step down the bank toward the water.
“Wait!” whispered the girl. “Here they come now, we can see them from here in a moment,” and she dragged the mucker down behind a bush.
In silence the two watched the approaching party.
“They’re the Chinks,” announced Byrne, who insisted on using this word to describe the proud and haughty samurai.
“Yes, and there are two white men with them,” whispered Barbara Harding, a note of suppressed excitement in her voice.
“Prisoners,” said Byrne. “Some of the precious bunch from the Halfmoon doubtless.”
The samurai were moving straight up the edge of the river. In a few minutes they would pass within a hundred feet of the island. Billy and the girl crouched low behind their shelter.
“I don’t recognize them,” said the man.
“Why—why—O Mr. Byrne, it can’t be possible!” cried the girl with suppressed excitement. “Those two men are Captain Norris and Mr. Foster, mate of the Lotus!”
Byrne half rose to his feet. The party was opposite their hiding place now.
“Sit tight,” he whispered. “I’m goin’ to get ’em,” and then, fiercely “for your sake, because I love you—now laugh,” and he was gone.
He ran lightly down the river bank unnoticed by the samurai who had already passed the island. In one hand he bore the long war spear of the headhunter he had slain. At his belt hung the long sword of Oda Yorimoto, and in its holster reposed the revolver of the Count de Cadenet.
Barbara Harding watched him as be forded the river, and clambered up the opposite bank. She saw him spring rapidly after the samurai and their prisoners. She saw
