Part 11

“Do as you please, then,” he said shortly, and reentered the cabin. But the next moment he saw his error in betraying an irritation that was open to misconstruction. He came out again, scarcely looking at the girl, who was lounging away.

“Do you want me to explain to you how the thing works?” he said indifferently. “I can't show you unless a ship comes in.”

The girl's eyes brightened softly as she turned to him.

“Do tell me,” she said, with an anticipatory smile and flash of white teeth. “Won't you?”

She certainly was very pretty and simple, in spite of her late speech. Jarman briefly explained to her the movements of the semaphore arms and their different significance. She listened with her capped head a little on one side like an attentive bird, and her arms unconsciously imitating the signs. Certainly, for all that she SPOKE like an American, her gesticulation was Italian.

“And then,” she said triumphantly when he paused, “when the sailors see that sign up they know they are coming in the harbor.”

Jarman smiled, as he had not smiled since he had been there. He corrected this mistake of her eager haste to show her intelligence, and, taking the telescope, pointed out the other semaphore,--a thin black outline on a distant inland hill. He then explained how HIS signs were repeated by that instrument to San Francisco.

“My! Why, I always allowed that was only the cross stuck up in the Lone Mountain Cemetery,” she said.

“You are a Catholic?”

“I reckon.”

“And you are an Italian?”

“Father is, but mother was a 'Merikan, same as me. Mother's dead.”

“And your father is the fisherman yonder?”

“Yes,--but,” with a look of pride, “he's got the biggest boat of any.”

“And only you and your family are ashore here?”

“Yes, and sometimes Mark.” She laughed an odd little laugh.

“Mark? Who's he?” he asked quickly.

He had not noticed the sudden coquettish pose and half-affected bashfulness of the girl; he was thinking only of the possibility of detection by strangers.

“Oh, he is Marco Franti, but I call him 'Mark.' It's the same name, you know, and it makes him mad,” said the girl, with the same suggestion of archness and coquetry.

But all this was lost on Jarman.

“Oh, another Italian,” he said, relieved. She turned away a little awkwardly when he added, “But you haven't told me YOUR name, you know.”

“Cara.”

“Cara,--that's 'dear' in Italian, isn't it?” he said, with a reminiscence of the opera and a half smile.

“Yes,” she said a little scornfully, “but it means Carlotta,--Charlotte, you know. Some girls call me Charley,” she said hurriedly.

“I see--Cara--or Carlotta Franti.”

To his surprise she burst into a peal of laughter.

“I reckon not YET. Franti is Mark's name, not mine. Mine is Murano,--Carlotta Murano. Good-by.” She moved away, then stopped suddenly and said, “I'm comin' again some time when the thing is working,” and with a nod of her head, ran away. He looked after her; could see the outlines of her youthful figure in her slim cotton gown,--limp and clinging in the damp sea air, and the sudden revelation of her bare ankles thrust stockingless into canvas shoes.

He went back into his cabin, when presently his attention was engrossed by an incoming vessel. He made the signals, half expecting, almost hoping, that the girl would return to watch him. But her figure was already lost in the sand dunes. Yet he fancied he still heard the echoes of her voice and his own in this cabin which had so long been dumb and voiceless, and he now started at every sound. For the first time he became aware of the dreadful disorder and untidiness of its uninvaded privacy. He could scarcely believe he had been living with his stove, his bed, and cooking utensils all in one corner of the barnlike room, and he began to put them “to rights” in a rough, hard formality, strongly suggestive of his convict experience. He rolled up his blankets into a hard cylinder at the head of his cot. He scraped out his kettles and saucepans, and even “washed down” the floor, afterwards sprinkling clean dry sand, hot with the noonday sunshine, on its half-dried boards. In arranging these domestic details he had to change the position of a little mirror; and glancing at it for the first time in many days, he was dissatisfied with his straggling beard,--grown during his voyage from Australia,--and although he had retained it as a disguise, he at once shaved it off, leaving only a mustache, and revealing a face from which a healthier life and out-of-door existence had removed the last traces of vice and dissipation. But he did not know it.