[The Midnight Passenger by Richard Henry Savage]@TWC D-Link bookThe Midnight Passenger CHAPTER XIV 27/35
Hide your dangerous beauty there, among those who give their lives up to good works. "And you will find peace and hope stealing to your side.
God gave you a life; you have no right to throw it away." The poor, repentant, soiled one seized his hand and kissed it, while bitter tears rained from her eyes.
"I will work; I will go where I cannot be hunted into a deeper hell than my accusing conscience brings up!" There was a grim vigilance in every movement of Dennis McNerney as he watched the now haggard-eyed Braun in the tank cell far below the decks, where Fashion's children gaily chattered. Only a few gruff sentences had ever escaped the murderer on the long voyage, and only a horrible curse had answered the proposition of Atwater and McNerney that a full confession might, in some way, soften the brute's impending doom. The room where Braun was confined was bare of all lethal implements with which he might effect a suicide, and two stalwart men were his room-mates. When the quartermasters, at midnight, peered out for the first glimpse of Fire Island light, Dennis McNerney, pacing the deserted deck, almost alone, revolved his plan of inspecting the sullen prisoner at intervals of every three hours during the night.
"It is a desperate human brute, that one," muttered the sturdy policeman; "but, I've brought him safely home." While a wild coast storm raged, and the screaming gulls circled around the plunging ship; while shrill winds moaned in the steel rigging, McNerney crept down for the last time before sighting land, at four o'clock, to peer through the grated door and see Fritz Braun lying prone--a confused heap--his coat rolled up as a pillow under his head. The wounded arm alone was free; the other, shackled to a broad belt, was locked around the prisoner's waist. "He is sleeping like a child," mused the officer.
"In a few hours he will be safely in the Tombs, and my long watch will be over!" The great liner was grandly sweeping up to Quarantine, when Dennis McNerney leaped from his berth and followed the startled cabin-boy, who shook him roughly. "Come down, sir! THERE'S SOMETHING WRONG!" the boy babbled.
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