Page:Ballinger Price--Fortune of the Indies.djvu/222

 This was new adventure now, adventure exciting, perilous, and uncertain enough without the added apprehension of pursuit.

It was not so bad, there in the boat, Mark reflected. If you looked at in the light of an exploring expedition, or of roughing it on the water, it was a pretty good sort of adventure, in fact. The lamp being out, it was impossible to see the strange, many-legged things which crept and crawled and clambered in the boat. On the other hand, there were the same stars to see that hung over Resthaven, good familiar lamps by which to steer a ship. Then he remembered that there were no stars at this hour in Resthaven, and that Jane, in all likelihood, was walking out to Bluff Point before luncheon. What would he have thought if he could have known that these stars of the Eastern Hemisphere hung above Jane, too!

By the time that Alan went on watch and Mark lay down for the dubious comfort of sleep on the hard floor, a late moon had climbed above the dark, waving fingers of the reeds. Alan watched it swim upward between the stars, faintly lighting the flat bank and the stream on which there sometimes passed the mysterious shape of a silently gliding junk.