Page:Anderson--Isle of seven moons.djvu/191

Rh I been true to yuh an staked yuh an' stood for your leaving me flat an everything. Before Gawd, I ask yuh not to go.—It means death—do yuh hear—death." And there was a sincerity in that last huskily whispered word that seemed to show more genuine fear than any desire for mere histrionic effect.

She actually cried (it was hard work for Carlotta, the weeping being rather expressed in shrieks and moans than salty tears), then ran the whole gamut of wringing of hands, and stamping, and kicking, until her arms were seized from behind, and across her vociferous lips was thrust a hand that was viselike for all its alabaster finish.

His watch came out.

"I'll give you just one minute, sixty seconds—d'y' hear? to make up your mind—once and for all."

She watched the hands of the stopwatch ticking away, as if the little black arrow marked her own swift race into the jaws of annihilation.

Phil was standing up in the boat, or rather trying to.

"Come on, be a shport, Carlotta."

Then he drunkenly fell athwart the gunwale, to be hauled in by the slack of the trousers, a ridiculous figure.

"All right, I know when I'm beaten," the girl admitted between the slightly relaxed fingers, and then as she stepped in the boat, her short skirts unnecessarily raised in abject apprehension of this alarming new means of locomotion, she muttered,—"But Gawd help that medyum if I ever get these claws on her."

The moon shone out gloriously now, in a golden and most