But a nearer look at
him stopped the impulse at its birth. Here was the Dyck Calhoun she had
known in days gone by, but not the Dyck she had looked to see; for this
man was like one who had come from a hanging, who had seen his dearest
swinging at the end of a rope. His face was set in coldness; his hair
was streaked with grey; his forehead had a line in the middle; his manner
was rigid, almost frigid, indeed. Only in his eyes was there that which
denied all that his face and manner said--a hungry, absorbing, hopeless
look, the look of one who searches for a friend in the denying desert.
Somehow, when he bowed low to her, and looked her in the eyes as no one
in all her life had ever done, she had an almost agonized understanding
of what a man feels who has been imprisoned--that is, never the same
again. He was an ex-convict, and yet she did not feel repelled by him.
She did not believe he had killed Erris Boyne. As for the later crime
of mutiny, that did not concern her much. She was Irish; but, more than
that, she was in sympathy with the mutineers. She understood why Dyck
Calhoun, enlisting as a common sailor, should take up their cause and run
risk to advance it.
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