Page:Arthur Stringer - Gun Runner.djvu/47

 some ever-adventuring thirst for activity. Though his eyes were impersonally studious and abstracted, there was a redeeming line or two of humour about the mouth. His hands were long and bony and slender, with some thing persistently scholar-like about them, for all their scarred and calloused and sinewed strength. This impression was further borne out by the restless, uncoördinated, and at times, almost wolf-like restlessness of the spare and nervous body as he passed back and forth in the narrow cabin. There seemed something unsubjugated in his long strides, as though he and his great length of limb had not yet grown used to confined places. This sense of an achieved repression was strengthened by the touch of audacity about the wide and clear-seeing eyes as he circled his room or sat sprawlingly before his instruments—of an audacity tempered with intelligence.

He nodded cheerfully enough to the steward, however, at the sight of the coffee-cake and the steaming tea. Then he turned back to his responder. The steward, leaving his tea and cake on the seat of a broken-armed steamer-chair, went on his way, and the deck was again deserted.

"Why aren't you getting the Princeton, there?" Captain Yandel once more demanded