Page:Vance--The false faces.djvu/274

254 "It was stolen; when I returned to my stateroom that night I was held up and robbed. The thief shot at me, killed his confederate, decamped by way of the port. I pursued. Another aided him to overpower and cast me overboard."

"Yet you escaped …!"

Strange she should seem more intrigued by that than concerned about her loss!

"I escaped, no matter how . …"

"You don't know who stole the packet?"

"I don't recall the man among the passengers, but he may have been in one of the boats, a fellow of about my stature, with a flowing beard. …"

He sketched broadly Ekstrom as he had seen him in the Stanistreet library.

Her eyes quickened.

"One such escaped in our boat, the second steward; I think his name was Anderson."

"Doubtless the same."

"Then it is gone!"

For once in his acquaintance with her, that brave spirit seemed to falter: she became a burden, bereft for a little of all grace and spontaneity.

He was constrained to swing her forcibly into time.

Almost instantly she recollected herself, covered her lapse with a little laugh innocent of any hint of its forced falsity, and showed him and the room as well a radiant countenance: all with such address and art that the incident might well have escaped notice, otherwise have passed for a bit of natural by-play.