another, toiling on and ever on like strange misshapen spirits doomed to
run an endless race. The harsh, shapeless light of imminent day alone
manufactured a colour of difference: Whitaker now was able to see as two
dark shapes the men in the body of the leading boat. The woman was not
visible, but the doors to the cabin were closed, confirming his surmise
that she at least had been sheltered through the night. One of the men
was standing by the wheel, forward, staring ahead. The other occupied a
seat in the cockpit, head and shoulders alone visible above the coaming.
For the most part he seemed sunk in lethargy, head fallen forward, chin
on chest; but now and then he looked up and back at the pursuing boat,
his face a featureless patch of bleached pink.
Now suddenly the man at the wheel cried out something in a terrible
voice of fright, so high and vehement that it even carried back against
the booming gale for Whitaker to hear. Simultaneously he put the wheel
over, with all his might. The other jumped from his seat, only to be
thrown back as the little vessel swung broadside to the sea, heeling
until she lay almost on her beam ends. The next instant she ceased,
incredibly, to move--hung motionless in that resistless surge, an
amazing, stupefying spectacle. It seemed minutes before Whitaker could
force his wits to comprehend that she had struck and lay transfixed upon
some submerged rock or reef.
A long, gray roller swept upon and over her, brimming her cockpit with
foaming water. As it passed he saw the half-drowned men release the
coamings, to which they had clung on involuntary impulse to escape being
swept away, scramble upon the cabin roof, and with one accord abandon
themselves to the will of the next wave to follow. As it broke over the
boat and passed, he caught an instantaneous glimpse of their heads and
arms bobbing and beating frantically as they whirled off through the
yeasty welter.
But he saw this without pity or compassion. If he had been able to have
his will with them, he would have sunk both ten fathoms deep without an
instant's respite. His throat was choked with curses that welled up from
a heart wrenched and raging at this discovery of cowardice unparalleled.
They had done what they could for themselves without even hesitating to
release the woman imprisoned in the cabin.
XIV
DEBACLE
The _Trouble_, meantime, was closing in upon the scene of tragedy with
little less than locomotive speed. Yet, however suddenly disaster had
overtaken the other vessel, Whitaker saw what he saw and had time to
take measures to avoid collision, if what he did was accomplished wholly
without conscious thought or premeditation. He had applied the reversing
gear to the motor before he knew it. Then, while the engine choked,
coughing angrily, and reversed with a heavy and resentful pounding in
the cylinder-heads, he began to strip off his coat. He was within ten
yards of the wreck when a wave overtook the _Trouble_ and sent a sheet
of water sprawling over her stern to fill the cockpit ankle-deep. The
next instant he swung the wheel over; the boat, moving forward despite
the resistance of the propeller, drove heavily against the wreck,
broadside to its stern. As this happened Whitaker leaped from one to the
other, went to his knees in the cockpit of the wreck, and rose just in
time to grasp the coaming and hold on against the onslaught of a
hurtling comber.
It came down, an avalanche, crashing and bellowing, burying him deep in
green. Thunderings benumbed him, and he began to strangle before it
passed....
He found himself filling his lungs with free air and fighting his way
toward the cabin doors through water waist-deep. Then he had won to
them, had found and was tearing frantically at the solid brass bolt that
held them shut. In another breath he had torn them open, wide,
discovering the woman, her head and shoulders showing above the flood as
she stood upon a transom, near the doorway, grasping a stanchion for
support. Her eyes met his, black and blank with terror. He snatched
through sheer instinct at a circular life-preserver that floated out
toward him, and simultaneously managed to crook an arm round her neck.
Again the sea buried them beneath tons of raging dark water. Green
lightnings flashed before his eyes, and in his ears there was a crashing
like the crack of doom. His head was splitting, his heart on the point
of breaking. The wave passed on, roaring. He could breathe. Now if
ever....
As if stupefied beyond sensibility, the woman was passive to his
handling. If she had struggled, if she had caught at and clung to him,
or even if she had tried to help herself, he would in all likelihood
have failed to cheat destruction. But she did none of these things, and
he managed somehow to drag her from the cabin to the cockpit and to jam
the life ring over her head and under one arm before the next wave bore
down upon them.
As the wall of living green water drew near, he twisted one hand into
the life-line of the cork ring and lifted the woman to the seat of the
cockpit.
They were borne down, brutally buffeted, smothered and swept away. They
came to the surface in the hollow of a deep, gray swale, fully fifty
feet from the wreck. Whitaker retained his grasp of the life-preserver
line. The woman floated easily in the support. He fancied a gleam of
livelier consciousness in her staring eyes, and noticed with a curiously
keen feeling of satisfaction that she was not only keeping her mouth
closed, but had done so, apparently, while under water.
Relieved from danger of further submersion, at all events for the time
being, he took occasion to rally his wits and look about him as well as
he was able. It was easy, now, to understand how the kidnappers had come
to their disaster; at this distance he could see plainly, despite the
scudding haze, the profile of a high bluff of wave-channelled and bitten
earth rising from a boulder-strewn beach, upon which the surf broke with
a roar deafening and affrighting. Even a hardy swimmer might be pardoned
for looking askance at such a landing. And Whitaker had a woman to think
of and care for. Difficult to imagine how he was to drag her, and
himself, through that vicious, pounding surf, without being beaten to
jelly against the boulders....
As the next billow swung them high on its racing crest, he, gaining a
broader field of vision, caught an instantaneous impression of a stark
shoulder of the land bulking out through the mists several hundred yards
to the left; suggesting that the shore curved inward at that spot. The
thought came to him that if he could but weather that point, he might
possibly find on the other side a better landing-place, out of the more
forcible, direct drive of surf. It would be next to an impossibility to
make it by swimming, with but one arm free, and further handicapped by
the dead weight of the woman. And yet that way lay his only hope.
In that same survey he saw the _Trouble_, riding so low, with only bow
and coamings awash, that he knew she must be waterlogged, rolling
beam-on in to the beach. Of the two men from the other boat he saw
nothing whatever. And when again he had a similar chance to look, the
hapless power-boat was being battered to pieces between the boulders.
Even such would be their fate unless....
He put forth every ounce of strength and summoned to his aid all his
water wisdom and skill. But he fought against terrible odds, and there
was no hope in him as he fought.
Then suddenly, to his utter amazement, the lift of a wave discovered to
him a different contour of the shore; not that the shore had changed,
but his position with regard to it had shifted materially and in
precisely the way that he had wished for and struggled to bring about.
Instead of being carried in to the rock-strewn beach, they were in the
grip of a backwash which was bearing them not only out of immediate
danger, but at the same time alongshore toward the point under whose lee
he hoped to find less turbulent conditions.
It was quite half the battle--more than half; he had now merely to see
that the set of this backward flow did not drag them too far from shore.
Renewed faith in his star, a sense of possible salvation, lent strength
to his flagging efforts. Slowly, methodically, he worked with his charge
toward the landward limits of the current, cunningly biding the time to
abandon it. And very soon that time came; they were abreast the point;
he could see something of a broad, shelving beach, backed by lesser
bluffs, to leeward of it. He worked free of the set with a mighty
expenditure of force, nervous and physical, and then for a time, rested,
limiting his exertion strictly to the degree requisite to keep him
afloat, while the waves rocked him landwards with the woman. He found
leisure even to give her a glance to see whether she still lived, was
conscious or comatose.
He found her not only fully aware of her position, but actually swimming
a little--striking out with more freedom than might have been expected,
considering how her arms and shoulders were hampered by the life-ring. A
suspicion crossed his mind that most probably she had been doing as much
for a considerable time, that to her as much as to himself their escape
from the offshore drift had been due. Certainly he could not doubt that
her energies had been subjected to a drain no less severe than he had
suffered. Her face was bloodless to the lips, pale with the pallor of
snow; deep bluish shadows ringed eyes that had darkened strangely, so
that they seemed black rather than violet; her features were so drawn
and pinched that he almost wondered how he could have thought her
beautiful beyond all living women. And her wondrous hair, broken from
its fastenings, undulated about her like a tangled web of sodden
sunbeams.
Three times he essayed to speak before he could wring articulate sounds
from his cracked lips and burning throat.
"You ... all right?"
She replied with as much difficulty:
"Yes ... you may ... let go...."
To relax the swollen fingers that grasped the life-line was pure
torture.
He attempted no further communication. None, indeed, was needed. It was
plain that she understood their situation.
Some minutes passed before he became aware that they were closing in
quickly to the shelving beach--so swiftly, indeed, that there was reason
to believe the onward urge of the waves measurably reenforced by a
shoreward set of current. But if they had managed to escape the greater
fury on the weather side of the point, they had still a strong and angry
surf to reckon with. Only a little way ahead, breakers were flaunting
their white manes, while the thunder of their breaking was as the
thundering of ten thousand hoofs.
Whitaker looked fearfully again at the woman. But she was unquestionably
competent to care for herself. Proof of this he had in the fact that she
had contrived to slip the life-preserver up over her head and discard it
altogether. Thus disencumbered, she had more freedom for the impending
struggle.
He glanced over his shoulder. They were on the line of breakers. Behind
them a heavy comber was surging in, crested with snow, its concave belly
resembling a vast sheet of emerald. In another moment it would be upon
them. It was the moment a seasoned swimmer would seize.
[Illustration: Whitaker felt land beneath his feet]
His eye sought the girl's. In hers he read understanding and assent. Of
one mind, they struck out with all their strength. The comber overtook
them, clasped them to its bosom, tossed them high upon its great glassy
shoulder. They fought madly to retain that place, and to such purpose
that they rode it over a dozen yards before it crashed upon the beach,
annihilating itself in a furious welter of creaming waters. Whitaker
felt land beneath his feet....
The rest was like the crisis of a nightmare drawn out to the limit of
human endurance. Conscious thought ceased: terror and panic and the
blind instinct of self-preservation--these alone remained. The undertow
tore at Whitaker's legs as with a hundred murderous hands. He fought his
way forward a few paces--or yard or two--only to be overwhelmed, ground
down into the gravel. He rose through some superhuman effort and lunged
on, like a blind, hunted thing.... He came out of it eventually to find
himself well up on the beach, out of the reach of the waves. But the
very earth seemed to billow about him, and he could hardly keep his
feet. A numbing faintness with a painful retching at once assailed him.
He was but vaguely aware of the woman reeling not far from him, but
saved....
Later he found that something of the worst effects had worn away. His
scattered wits were reestablishing intercommunication. The earth was
once more passably firm beneath him. He was leaning against the careened
hulk of a dismantled cat-boat with a gaping rent in its side. At a
little distance the woman was sitting in the sands, bosom and shoulders
heaving convulsively, damp, matted hair veiling her like a curtain of
sunlit seaweed.
He moved with painful effort toward her. She turned up to him her
pitiful, writhen face, white as parchment.
"Are you--hurt?" he managed to ask. "I mean--injured?"
She moved her head from side to side, as if she could not speak for
panting.
"I'm--glad," he said dully. "You stay--here.... I'll go get help."
He raised his eyes, peering inland.
Back of the beach the land rose in long, sweeping hillocks, treeless but
green. His curiously befogged vision made out a number of shapes that
resembled dwellings.
"Go ... get ... help ..." he repeated thickly.
He started off with a brave, staggering rush that carried him a dozen
feet inland. Then his knees turned to water, and the blackness of night
shut down upon his senses.
XV
DISCLOSURES
Sleep is a potent medicine for the mind; but sometimes the potion is
compounded with somewhat too heavy a proportion of dreams and nonsense;
when it's apt to play curious tricks with returning consciousness. When
Whitaker awoke he was on the sands of Narragansett, and the afternoon
was cloudy-warm and bright, so that his eyes were grateful for the shade
of a white parasol that a girl he knew was holding over him; and his age
was eighteen and his cares they were none; and the girl was saying in a
lazy, laughing voice: "I love my love with a P because he's Perfectly
Pulchritudinous and Possesses the Power of Pleasing, and because he
Prattles Prettily and his socks are Peculiarly Purple--"
"And," the man who'd regained his youth put in, "his name is Peter and
he's Positively a Pest...."
But the voice in which he said this was quite out of the picture--less a
voice than a croak out of a throat kiln-dry and burning. So he grew
suspicious of his senses; and when the parasol was transformed into the
shape of a woman wearing a clumsy jacket of soiled covert-cloth over a
non-descript garment of weirdly printed calico--then he was sure that
something was wrong with him.
Besides, the woman who wasn't a parasol suddenly turned and bent over
him an anxious face, exclaiming in accents of consternation: "O dear! If
he's delirious--!"
His voice, when he strove to answer, rustled and rattled rather than
enunciated, surprising him so that he barely managed to say: "What
nonsense! I'm just thirsty!" Then the circuit of returning consciousness
closed and his lost youth slipped forever from his grasp.
"I thought you would be," said the woman, calmly; "so I brought water.
Here...."
She offered a tin vessel to his lips, as he lay supine, spilling a
quantity of its contents on his face and neck and a very little into his
mouth, if enough to make him choke and splutter. He sat up suddenly,
seized the vessel--a two-quart milk-pail--and buried his face in it,
gradually tilting it, while its cool, delicious sweetness irrigated his
arid tissues, until every blessed drop was drained. Then, and not till
then, he lowered the pail and with sane vision began to renew
acquaintance with the world.
He was sitting a trifle out of the shallow imprint of his body in the
sands, in the lee of the beached cat-boat he now recalled as one might
the features of an incubus. The woman he had rescued sat quite near him.
The gale was still booming overhead, but now with less force (or so he
fancied); and the surf still crashed in thunders on the beach a hundred
feet or more away; but the haze was lighter, and the blue of the sky was
visible, if tarnished.
Looking straight ahead from where he sat, the sands curved off in a wide
crescent, ending in a long, sandy spit. Beyond this lay a broad expanse
of maddened water, blue and white, backed by the empurpled loom of a
lofty headland, dim in the smoky distance.
On his right lay the green landscape, reminiscent even as the boat was
reminiscent in whose shadow he found himself: both fragments of the
fugitive impressions gathered in that nightmare time of landing. There
was a low, ragged earth-bank rising from the sands to a clutter of
ramshackle, unpainted, hideous wooden buildings--some hardly more than
sheds; back of these and stretching away on either hand, a spreading
vista of treeless uplands, gently undulant and richly carpeted with
grass and under-growth in a melting scheme of tender browns and greens
and yellows, with here and there a trace of dusky red. Midway between
the beach and where the hazy uplands lifted their blurred profile
against the faded sky, set some distance apart from the community of
dilapidated structures, stood a commonplace farm-house, in good repair,
strongly constructed and neatly painted; with a brood of out buildings.
Low stone fences lined the uplands with wandering streaks of gray. Here
and there, in scattered groups and singly, sheep foraged. But they were
lonely evidences of life. No human being was visible in any quarter.
With puzzled eyes Whitaker sought counsel and enlightenment of the
woman, and found in her appearance quite as much to confound
anticipation and deepen perplexity. She was hardly to be identified with
the delightfully normal, essentially well-groomed creature he
remembered. What she had worn when setting forth to call on him,
accompanied by her maid, the night before, he could not say; but it
certainly could have had nothing in common with her present dress--the
worn, stained, misshapen jacket covering her shoulders, beneath it the
calico wrapper scant and crude beyond belief, upon her feet the rusty
wrecks that once had been shoes.
As for himself, a casual examination proved that the rags and tatters
adorning him were at least to be recognized as the remains of his own
clothing. His coat was lost, of course, and his collar he had torn away,
together with a portion of his shirt, while in the water after the
disaster; but his once white flannel trousers were precious souvenirs,
even if one leg was ripped open to the knee, and even though the cloth
as a whole had contracted to an alarming extent--uncomfortable as well;
while his tennis shoes remained tolerably intact, and the canvas brace
had shrunk upon his ankle until it gripped it like a vise.
But all these details he absorbed rather than studied, in the first few
moments subsequent to his awakening. His chiefest and most direct
interest centred upon the woman; and he showed it clearly in the
downright, straightforward sincerity of his solicitous scrutiny. And,
for all the handicap of her outlandish dress, she bore inspection
wonderfully well.
Marvellously recuperative, as many women are, she had regained all her
ardent loveliness; or, if any trace remained of the wear and tear of her
fearful experience, he was in no condition to know it, much less to
carp. There was warm color in the cheeks that he had last seen livid,
there was the wonted play of light and shadow in her fascinating eyes;
there were gracious rounded curves where had been sunken surfaces,
hollowed out by fatigue and strain; and there remained the ineluctable
allurement of her tremendous vitality....
"You are not hurt?" he demanded. "You are--all right?"
"Quite," she told him with a smile significant of her appreciation of
his generous feeling. "I wasn't hurt, and I've recovered from my shock
and fright--only I'm still a little tired. But you?"
"Oh, I ... never better. That is, I'm rested; and there was nothing else
for me to get over."
"But your ankle--?"
"I've forgotten it ever bothered me.... Haven't you slept at all?"
"Oh, surely--a great deal. But I've been awake for some time--a few
hours."
"A few hours!" His stare widened with wonder. "How long have I--?"
"All day--like a log."
"But I--! What time is it?"
"I haven't a watch, but late afternoon, I should think--going by the
sun. It's nearly down."
"Good heavens!" he muttered, dashed. "I _have_ slept!"
"You earned your right to.... You needed it far more than I." Her eyes
shone, warm with kindness.
She swayed almost imperceptibly toward him. Her voice was low pitched
and a trifle broken with emotion:
"You saved my life--"
"I--? Oh, that was only what any other man--"
"None other did!"
"Please don't speak of it--I mean, consider it that way," he stammered.
"What I want to know is, where are we?"
Her reply was more distant. "On an island, somewhere. It's uninhabited,
I think."
He could only echo in bewilderment: "An island...! Uninhabited...!"
Dismay assailed him. He got up, after a little struggle overcoming the
resistance of stiff and sore limbs, and stood with a hand on the coaming
of the dismantled cat-boat, raking the island with an incredulous stare.
"But those houses--?"
"There's no one in any of them, that I could find." She stirred from her
place and offered him a hand. "Please help me up."
He turned eagerly, with a feeling of chagrin that she had needed to ask
him. For an instant he had both her hands, warm and womanly, in his
grasp, while she rose by his aid, and for an instant longer--possibly by
way of reward. Then she disengaged them with gentle firmness.
She stood beside him so tall and fair, so serenely invested with the
flawless dignity of her womanhood that he no longer thought of the
incongruity of her grotesque garb.
"You've been up there?" he asked, far too keenly interested to scorn the
self-evident.
She gave a comprehensive gesture, embracing the visible prospect. "All
over.... When I woke, I thought surely ... I went to see, found nothing
living except the sheep and some chickens and turkeys in the farmyard.
Those nearer buildings--nothing there except desolation, ruin, and the
smell of last year's fish. I think fishermen camp out here at times. And
the farm-house--apparently it's ordinarily inhabited. Evidently the
people have gone away for a visit somewhere. It gives the impression of
being a home the year round. There isn't any boat--"
"No boat!"
"Not a sign of one, that I can find--except this wreck." She indicated
the cat-boat.
"But we can't do anything with this," he expostulated.
The deep, wide break in its side placed it beyond consideration, even if
it should prove possible to remedy its many other lacks.
"No. The people who live here must have a boat--I saw a mooring-buoy out
there"--with a gesture toward the water. "Of course. How else could they
get away?"
"The question is, how we are to get away," he grumbled, morose.
"You'll find the way," she told him with quiet confidence.
"I! I'll find the way? How?"
"I don't know--only you must. There must be some way of signalling the
mainland, some means of communication. Surely people wouldn't live here,
cut off from all the World.... Perhaps we'll find something in the
farm-house to tell us what to do. I didn't have much time to look round.
I wanted clothing, mostly--and found these awful things hanging behind
the kitchen door. And then I wanted something to eat, and I found
that--some bread, not too stale, and plenty of eggs in the hen-house....
And you--you must be famished!"
The reminder had an effect singularly distressing. Till then he had been
much too thunderstruck by comprehension of their anomalous plight to
think of himself. Now suddenly he was stabbed through and through with
pangs of desperate hunger. He turned a little faint, was seized with a
slight sensation of giddiness, at the thought of food, so that he was
glad of the cat-boat for support.