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Lanyard found himself exchanging looks of mystification with Collison, and heard his own voice make the flat statement: "But there is nobody...." Collison muttered words which he took to be: No, and never was. "But you must have seen him from the bridge," Lanyard insisted blankly, "if...."
Phinuit and Liane Delorme were too busy to heed; quietly Lanyard slipped the pistol into a pocket and got to his feet. Then Swain came charging down the steps to find out what all the row was about, and to report which he did as soon as Monk was sufficiently recovered to understand those outrageous and darkly mysterious assaults upon the helmsman and Mr. Collison.
"But I am afraid..." "Do not be. Remember Mr. Collison and I... Besides, you know, there was nobody..." The assertion seemed to exasperate her; her voice discovered new strength and violence. "But I am telling you I saw ... that assassin!" she shuddered again "standing there, in the shadow, glaring at me as if I had surprised him and he did not know what next to do.
Of these, Copper Bay, Gray Bay, Laskeek Bay, Crescent Inlet, Sedgwick Bay, Werner Bay, Island Bay, George Bay, Collison Bay, Carpenter Bay, Provost Bay, Luxana Bay, and Seal Cove are the most important.
Swain entertained a private opinion of the lot of them, Captain Monk included, decidedly uncomplimentary. But he was a civil sort, though deficient in sense of humour and inclined to be a bit abrupt in a preoccupied fashion. Mr. Collison, the second mate, was another kind entirely, an American with the drawl of the South in his voice, a dark, slender man with eyes quick and shrewd.
I think he must have been spying down through the skylight; it was the glow from it that showed me his red, dirty face of a pig." "You came aft on the port side, didn't you?" Lanyard enquired of the second mate. Collison nodded. "Running," he said "couldn't imagine what was up." "It is easy not to see what one is not looking for," Lanyard mused, staring forward along the starboard side.
The standing of the victims, including a Governor appointed by the Hudson's Bay Company, his staff men of position, the unexpectedness of the collison, the suddenness of the attack, the destruction of life, the cruelty and injustice of the killing, and the barbarous treatment of the bodies of the dead, by the Bois-brulés war party, fill one with horror, and remind one of scenes of butchery in dark Africa or the isles of the South Sea.
Passing the engine-room ventilators he heard the telegraph give a single stroke; Mr. Collison had only then recovered from, his astonishment sufficiently to signal to slow down. A squeal of the speaking-tube whistle followed instantly; and Lanyard set foot upon the bridge in time to hear Mr. Collison demanding to know what the sanguinary hades had happened down there.
Mussey was beginning to comprehend that there was in this world one woman at least who could take an intelligent interest in machinery. Mr. Collison succumbed without a struggle. True to the tradition of Southern chivalry, he ambled up to the block, laid his head upon it, and asked for the axe. Nor was he kept long waiting...
Collison emerged from his quarters in the deck-house beneath the bridge and ran up the ladder to relieve Mr. Swain. At the same time a seaman came from forward and ascended by the other ladder. Later Mr. Swain and the man whose trick at the wheel was ended left the bridge, the latter to go forward to his rest, Mr. Swain to turn into his room in the deck-house.
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