Page:Frank Stockton--Adventures of Captain Horn.djvu/434

ADVENTURES OF CAPTAIN HORN glowing splendor as the future life of Captain Horn now shone and sparkled before him, as he walked and walked, on and on, and crossed the river into the Latin Quarter, before he perceived that his hotel was a mile or more behind him.

From the moment that the Arato had left the Straits of Magellan, and Captain Horn had had reason to believe that he had left his dangers behind him, the prow of his vessel had been set toward the Strait of Gibraltar, and every thought of his heart toward Edna. Burke and Shirley both noticed a change in him. After he left the Rackbirds' cove, until he had sailed into the South Atlantic, his manner had been quiet, alert, generally anxious, and sometimes stern. But now, day by day, he appeared to be growing into a different man. He was not nervous, nor apparently impatient, but it was easy to see that within him there burned a steady purpose to get on as fast as the wind would blow them northward.

Day by day, as he walked the deck of his little vessel, one might have thought him undergoing a transformation from the skipper of a schooner into the master of a great ship, into the captain of a swift Atlantic liner, into the commander of a man-of-war, into the commodore on board a line-of-battle ship. It was not an air of pride or assumed superiority that he wore, it was nothing assumed, it was nothing of which he was not entirely aware. It was the gradual growth within him, as health grows into a man recovering from a sickness, of the consciousness of power. The source of that consciousness lay beneath him, as he trod the deck of the Arato.

This consciousness, involuntary, and impossible to 418