"Give way! Give way!" She flew past the wool-clippers sleeping at
their anchors each with the open unwinking eye of the lamp in the
rigging; she flew past the flagship of the Pacific squadron, a
great mass all dark and silent, heavy with the slumbers of five
hundred men, and where the invisible sentries heard his urgent
"Give way! Give way!" in the night. The Kanakas, panting, rose
off the thwarts at every stroke. Nothing could be fast enough for
him! And he ran up the side of his schooner shaking the ladder
noisily with his rush.

On deck he stumbled and stood still.

Wherefore this haste? To what end, since he knew well before he
started that he had a pursuer from whom there was no escape.

As his foot touched the deck his will, his purpose he had been
hurrying to save, died out within. It had been nothing less than
getting the schooner under-way, letting her vanish silently in the
night from amongst these sleeping ships. And now he was certain he
could not do it. It was impossible! And he reflected that whether
he lived or died such an act would lay him under a dark suspicion
from which he shrank. No, there was nothing to be done.

He went down into the cabin and, before even unbuttoning his
overcoat, took out of the drawer the letter addressed to his
assistant; that letter which he had found in the pigeon-hole
labelled "Malata" in young Dunster's outer office, where it had
been waiting for three months some occasion for being forwarded.
From the moment of dropping it in the drawer he had utterly
forgotten its existence--till now, when the man's name had come out