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The news of the Gram base on Tanith spread slowly, first by the scheduled liners and tramp freighters that linked the Sword-Worlds, and then by trading ships and outbound Space Vikings to the Old Federation.
Somehow the idea obsessed her that he had gone to sea. She pictured him big and strong and brave, battling before the mast on some wallowing, storm-hectored trading ship outbound, bearing him away into the melting-pot of strange world-ways. Would he come clean through the moil, winning honor and his place among men? And thus would he some day return to her?
The great Shuttle of Love weaves the fabric of friendship across the seas as the ships come and go, bearing outbound and homebound missionaries to foreign fields.
"Why, Billie, what is the matter?" asked the girl. "We've traveled at cruising speed all night," he answered, "and now must be up close to the 'corner, as they call the position where the outbound liners change to the great circle course." "Well?" she said, inquiringly. "Did you ever hear of the Gigantia?" "Why, of course you mean the new liner?" "Yes; the latest and largest steamship built.
Then let me live farther out, always just beyond the last lamp on the outbound road, like Omar Khayyam in his strip of herbage, where there are no improvements, no conventionalities, where life is as large as the world and where the sweet sanities and intimacies of nature are as fresh and abundant as the dew of the morning.
This steamer, he found, lay over at the former port for thirteen hours, so he shifted again to an outbound boat headed for Woosung. It was not until he was on the tender, making the hour-long run from Woosung up the Whangpoo to Shanghai itself, that he seemed to emerge from his half-cataleptic indifference to his environment. He began to realize that he was at last in the Orient.
Occasionally a desultory breeze brought sounds of a burst of revelry from the Street of the Sailors; once the ports of an outbound space-ship flashed overhead for an instant. But there was mainly silence and darkness, and in it the five men, parleying close together in toneless whispers. After a little they separated. On cat's feet four of them stole around the sides of the house.
And it was with this arrow rankling in him that Kent bowed himself out and went to join the young women on the porch. The conversation on the Brentwood porch was chiefly of Breezeland Inn as a health and pleasure resort, until an outbound electric car stopped at the corner below and Loring came up to make a quartet of the trio behind the vine-covered trellis.
"I'll show her it's not too late," he promised himself. "I'll show her which of us is the man to make her happy. And, if I am not the man, I'll take the first outbound steamer and trouble them no more. But before that happens," he also promised himself, "Fearing must show he is the better man."
At this time the telephone line had been completed from Little Slave Lake to Peace River Landing, and the factor at the latter post had sent word for two wagons and teams to come up for these passengers, outbound.
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