Condy had risen to his feet, his breath was coming quick, his cigarette was flung away, and his hands opened and shut swiftly.
"Oh, Blixy, little girl, do YOU love ME?"
They stood there for a moment in the half dark, facing one another, their hearts beating, their breath failing them in the tension of the instant. There in that room, high above the city, a little climax had come swiftly to a head, a crisis in two lives had suddenly developed. The moment that had been in preparation for the last few months, the last few years, the last few centuries, behold! it had arrived.
"Blix, do you love me?"
Suddenly it was the New Year. Somewhere close at hand a chorus of chiming church bells sang together. Far off in the direction of the wharves, where the great ocean steamships lay, came the glad, sonorous shouting of a whistle; from a nearby street a bugle called aloud. And then from point to point, from street to roof top, and from roof to spire, the vague murmur of many sounds grew and spread and widened, slowly, grandly; that profound and steady bourdon, as of an invisible organ swelling, deepening, and expanding to the full male diapason of the city aroused and signaling the advent of another year.
And they heard it, they two heard it, standing there face to face, looking into each other's eyes, that unanswered question yet between them, the question that had come to them with the turning of the year. It was the old year yet when Condy had asked that question. In that moment's pause, while Blix hesitated to answer him, the New Year had come. And while the huge, vast note of the city swelled and vibrated, she still kept silent. But only for a moment. Then she came closer to him, and put a hand on each of his shoulders.
"Happy New Year, dear," she said.
On New Year's Day, the last day they were to be together, Blix and Condy took "their walk," as they had come to call it--the walk that included the lifeboat station, the Golden Gate, the ocean beach beyond the old fort, the green, bare, flower-starred hills and downs, and the smooth levels of the golf links. Blix had been busy with the last details of her packing, and they did not get started until toward two in the afternoon.
"Strike me!" exclaimed Captain Jack, as Blix informed him that she had come to say good-by. "Why, ain't this very sudden-like, Miss Bessemer? Hey, Kitty, come in here. Here's Miss Bessemer come to say good-by; going to New York to-morrow.""We'll regularly be lonesome without you, miss," said K. D. B., as she came into the front room, bringing with her a brisk, pungent odor of boiled vegetables. "New York--such a town as it must be!
It was called Manhattan at first, you know, and was settled by the Dutch."Evidently K. D. B. had reached the N's.
With such deftness as she possessed, Blix tried to turn the conversation upon the first meeting of the retired sea captain and the one-time costume reader, but all to no purpose. The "Matrimonial Objects" were perhaps a little ashamed of their "personals" by now, and neither Blix nor Condy were ever to hear their version of the meeting in the back dining-room of Luna's Mexican restaurant. Captain Jack was, in fact, anxious to change the subject.
"Any news of the yarn yet?" he suddenly inquired of Condy "What do those Eastern publishin' people think of Our Mug and Billy Isham and the whiskey schooner?"Condy had received the rejected manuscript of "In Defiance of Authority" that morning, accompanied by a letter from the Centennial Company.
"Well," he said in answer, "they're not, as you might say, falling over themselves trying to see who'll be the first to print it.
It's been returned."
"The devil you say!" responded the Captain. "Well, that's kind of disappointin' to you, ain't it?""But," Blix hastened to add, "we're not at all discouraged. We're going to send it off again right away."Then she said good-by to them.
"I dunno as you'll see me here when you come back, miss," said the Captain, at the gate, his arm around K. D. B. "I've got to schemin' again. Do you know," he added, in a low, confidential tone, "that all the mines in California send their clean-ups and gold bricks down to the Selby smeltin' works once every week? They send 'em to San Francisco first, and they are taken up to Selby's Wednesday afternoons on a little stern-wheel steamer called the "Monticello." All them bricks are in a box--dumped in like so much coal--and that box sets just under the wheel-house, for'ard. How much money do you suppose them bricks represent? Well, I'll tell you; last week they represented seven hundred and eighty thousand dollars. Well, now, I got a chart of the bay near Vallejo; the channel's all right, but there are mudflats that run out from shore three miles. Enough water for a whitehall, but not enough for--well, for the patrol boat, for instance. Two or three slick boys, of a foggy night--of course, I'm not in that kind of game, but strike! it would be a deal now, wouldn't it?""Don't you believe him, miss," put in K. D. B. "He's just talking to show off.""I think your scheme of holding up a Cunard liner," said Condy, with great earnestness, "is more feasible. You could lay across her course and fly a distress signal. She'd have to heave to.""Yes, I been thinkin' o' that; but look here--what's to prevent the liner taking right after your schooner after you've got the stuff aboard--just followin' you right around an' findin' out where you land?""She'd be under contract to carry Government mails," contradicted Condy. "She couldn't do that. You'd leave her mails aboard for just that reason. You wouldn't rob her of her mails; just so long as she was carrying government mails she couldn't stop."The Captain clapped his palm down upon the gate-post.
"Strike me straight! I never thought of that."
