The sun dwindled down to promise a kiss to the far horizon, over darkening waters lying still in late afternoon shadows. The shadows lengthened slowly as the hours ticked by, the sounds of music rising and fading as groups formed and unformed along the treeline within earshot of the Albert Hansell. In the dining lounge, Charles Stonewall Delacroix pushed himself away from a warming and fulfilling plate of buffalo steak, haricots verts, baby fried potatos and a fine Italian sald, lit a cheroot, and gazed out the window at the shadows. He drew a turnip-stem winder from his waistcoat pocket, and thought for a moment, gazing at it. His date with his old companion was in an hour and a half.

Throwing a silver dollar down on the table cloth and throwing back the dregs of Hennessy from his brandy snifter, he strolled out onto the prom deck and back to his stateroom. The door locked behind him with a firm, satisfying click. Dropping the key in his pocket, he drew the shade over the small porthole and lit the kerosene lamp suspended in a bracket on the wall. He took out the parchment he had lifted from the Heron agent posing as a bassist, now strangely disappeared , and studied it in the flickering light. It looked something like a river, something like a religious vision, and perhaps something like a blueprint for a steam engine he had once seen in an old blacksmith's shop in Cairo, Illinois, where they were trying to repair a low-pressure piston ring that had cracked. It was intricately drawn in extraordinarily fine lines, some red as blood from a newly cut artery, and some as black as a Heron's burnt-out soul.

HE ondered the matrix of numbers laid in fine rows in the lower right corner --he couldn't figure it out. 1..4..5..4...6.5...1...6.5...2.5...4...on and on for about twelve rows... He wrestled with cyphers he had seen during the war, but none of them seemed to match it. He sighed and returned it to his coat pocket, straightened his four-in-hand and shrugged it off, readying hiomself for his rendezvous. He puffed thoughtfully and hummed a snatch of a tune he had heard earlier in the day...

'Tis dust, to dust beneath the sod,
But there -- oh, there!--'tis heart to heart...

He doused the glim, unlocked the door, and made his way slowly toward the gangplank in the early evening shadows, watching, seeing everything and missing nothing.