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The big smoke seen that morning above the forests of the coast was some agreed signal from Tengga to Daman but what it meant Hassim had been unable to find out. He feared for Jorgenson's safety. He said that while one of the war-boats was being made ready to take the captives into the lagoon, he and his sister left the camp quietly and got away in their canoe.
He was heard again: "What I could tell you would be worse than poison." Mrs. Travers was not familiar with Jorgenson's consecrated phrases. The mechanical voice, the words themselves, his air of abstraction appalled her. And he hadn't done yet; she caught some more of his unconcerned mumbling: "There is nothing I don't know," and the absurdity of the statement was also appalling. Mrs.
Lingard pointed to the stockade on the right. "That's where your husband is," he said to Mrs. Travers. "Who is the other?" uttered Jorgenson's voice at their backs. He also was turned that way with his strange sightless gaze fixed beyond them into the void. "A Spanish gentleman I believe you said, Mrs Travers," observed Lingard.
On one of his visits Lingard had brought with him a black seaman's chest and left it there. Apart from these objects and a small looking-glass worth about half a crown and nailed to the wall there was nothing else in there whatever. What was on Jorgenson's side of the deckhouse no one had seen, but from external evidence one could infer the existence of a set of razors.
But what if Allah's call should come to him suddenly and he die as he ran! He drew a long breath on the shore of the lagoon within about a hundred yards from the stranded bows of the Emma. The tide was out and he walked to the end of a submerged log and sent out a hail for a boat. Jorgenson's voice answered. The sun had sunk behind the forest belt of the coast.
He returned spiritlessly to his state-room muttering, "No more sleep for me to-night," and came out directly, holding a few sheets of paper covered with a high, angular handwriting. This was Jorgenson's letter written three days before and entrusted to Hassim. Lingard had read it already twice, but he turned up the lamp a little higher and sat down to read it again.
Her bare and extended arm pointed across the lagoon, and Jorgenson's resurrected eyes glided along the white limb and wandered off into space. "No boat," he muttered. "There must be a canoe. I know there is a canoe. I want it."
Only he did not say "shook" and "shoes" but the above paraphrase conveys well enough his contemptuous meaning. Lingard tried now to remember and piece together the practical bits of old Jorgenson's amazing tales; but all that had remained with him was an approximate idea of the locality and a very strong but confused notion of the dangerous nature of its approaches.
Lingard's question, though he really didn't seem to care much about an answer, had aroused afresh her suspicion of Jorgenson's change of front. "I didn't have to say very much at the last," she continued, gasping yet a little and feeling her personality, crushed to nothing in the hug of those arms, expand again to its full significance before the attentive immobility of that man.
"I sail before sunrise," he shouted in answer, and went on board. When he came up from his cabin after an uneasy night, it was dark yet. A lank figure strolled across the deck. "Here I am," said Jorgenson, huskily. "Die there or here all one. But, if I die there, remember the girl must eat." Lingard was one of the few who had seen Jorgenson's girl.
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