ON THE _KITTIWINK_
When Hal left Snug Haven, he bent his shoulders to the storm and with
his suit-cases plowed through the gathering dusk toward Hadlock’s Cove.
Cold, slashing rain and boistering gusts left his wrath uncooled. Ugly,
brutalized, he kept his way past the smithy—past Laura’s house, and so
with glowering eyes on into the evening that caught and ravened at him.
The sight of Laura’s house filled him with an access of rage. That calm
security of shaded windows behind the rain-scourged hedge seemed to
typify the girl’s protection against him. He twisted his mouth into an
ugly grin.
“Think you’re safe, don’t you?” he growled, pausing a moment to glower
at the house. “Think I can’t get you, eh? I haven’t even begun yet!”
In the turmoil of his mind, no clear plan had as yet taken form. He
knew only that he had a boat and full supplies, that from him the ocean
held no secrets, that his muscles and his will had never yet known
defeat, and that the girl was his if he could take her.
“She’ll turn me down cold and get away with it, will she?” he snarled.
“She will—like hell!”
Forward he pushed again, meeting no one, and so passed Geyser Rock, now
booming under the charges of the surf. He skirted a patch of woods,
flailed by the wind, and beyond this turned through a stone wall, to
follow a path that led down to the cove. On either side of the path
stretched a rolling field, rich with tall grasses, with daisies,
buttercups, milfoil and devil’s paint-brush, drenched and beaten down
in the dusk by the sweep of the storm.
Louder and more loud rose, fell, the thunders of the sea, as Hal
approached the rocky dune at the far side of the field—a dune that on
its other edge sank to a shingle beach that bordered the cove.
To eastward, this beach consolidated itself into the rocky headland
of Barberry Point, around which the breakers were curving to hurl
themselves on the shingle. The wind, however, was at this point almost
parallel with the shore. Hal reckoned, as he tramped across the field,
that with good judgment and stiff work he could get the _Kittiwink_ to
sea at once.
And after that, what? He did not know. No definite idea existed in that
half-crazed, passion-scourged brain. The driving power of his strength
accursed, took no heed of anything but flight. Away, away, only to be
away!
“God!” he panted, stumbling up the dune to its top, where salt spray
and stinging rain skirled upon him in skittering drives. He dropped his
burdens, and flung out both huge arms toward the dark, tumbling void
of waters, streaked with crawling lines of white. “God! that’s what I
want! That’s what they’re trying to keep me away from! I’m going to
have it now—by God, I am!”
He stood there a moment, his oilskin hat slapping about his face. At
his right, three hundred yards away or so, he could just glimpse the
dark outlines of Jim Gordon’s little store that supplied rough needs of
lobstermen and fishers. Hal’s lip curled with scorn of the men he knew
were gathered in that dingy, smoky place, swapping yarns and smoking
pipes. They preferred that to the freedom of the night, the storm, the
sea! At them he shook his fist.
“There’s not one of you that’s half the man I am!” he shouted. “You
sit in there and run me down. I know! You’re doing it now—telling
how gramp had to pay because I licked a bully, and how I’ve got to
apologize! But you don’t dare come out into a night like this. I can
outsail you and outfight you all—and to hell with you!”
His rage somehow a little eased, he turned to the task immediately
confronting him. The beach sloped sharply to the surf. A litter of
driftwood, kelp and mulched rubbish was swirling back and forth among
the churning pebbles that with each refluent wave went clattering
down in a mad chorus. Here, there, drawn up out of harm’s way, lay
lobster-pots and dories. Just visible as a white blur tossing on the
obscure waters, the _Kittiwink_ rode at her buoy.
“Great little boat!” cried Hal. A vast longing swept over him to be
aboard, and away. The sea was calling his youth, strength, daring.
Laura? And would he go without the girl? Yes. Sometime, soon perhaps,
he would come back, would seize her, carry her away; but for now that
plan had grown as vaguely formless as his destination. Fumes of liquor
in his brain, of passion in his heart, blent with the roaring confusion
of the tempest. All was confusion, all a kind of wild and orgiastic
dream, culmination of heredity, of a spirit run _amok_.
Night, storm and wind shouted to the savage in this man. And, standing
erect there in the dark, arms up to fleeing cloud and ravening gale, he
howled back with mad laughter:
“Coming now! By God, I’m coming now!”
There was foam on his lips as he strode down the beach, flung the
suit-cases into a dory—and with a run and a huge-shouldered shove
across the shingle fairly flung the boat into the surf.
Waist-deep in chilling smothers of brine, he floundered, dragged
himself into the dory that shipped heavy seas, and flung the oars on
to the thole-pins. He steadied her nose into the surf, and with a few
strong pulls got her through the tumble. A matter of two or three
minutes, with such strength as lay in his arms of steel, brought him to
the lee of the _Kittiwink’s_ stern. He hove the suit-cases to the deck
of the dancing craft, then scrambled aboard and made the painter fast.
Again he laughed, exultingly. Now for the first time in his life his
will could be made law. Now he stood on his own deck, with plenty of
supplies below, and—above, about him—the unlimited power of the gale
to drive him any whither he should choose.
He strode to the companionway, his feet sure on the swaying deck, his
body lithely meeting every plunge, and slid back the hatch-cover.
Down into the cabin he pitched the cases and followed them. He struck
a match. It died. He cursed bitterly, tried again, and lighted the
cabin-lamp. His eyes, with the affection of ownership, roved around
the little place, taking in the berths, the folding-table, the stools.
He threw the suit-cases into a berth, opened one and took out a
square-face, which he uncorked and tipped high.
“Ah!” he sighed. “Some class!” He set the bottle in the rack and
breathed deeply. “Nice little berths, eh? Laura—she’d look fine here.
She’d fit great, as crew. And if she gave me any of her lip, then—”
His fist, doubled, swayed under the lamp-shine as he surveyed it
proudly.
“Great little boat,” judged Hal. “She’ll outsail ’em all, and I’m the
boy to make her walk!”
Huge, heavy, evil-faced, he stood there, swaying as the _Kittiwink_
rode the swells. He cast open his reefer, took out pipe and tobacco,
and lighted up. As he sucked at the stem, his hard lips, corded throat
and great jaws gave an impression of brutal power, in no wise differing
from that of old Alpheus Briggs, half a hundred years ago.
“Make me go to school and wear a blue ribbon,” he gibed, his voice a
contrabass to the shrilling of the wind aloft in the rig, the groaning
and creaking of the timbers. “Make me go round apologizing to drunken
bums. Like—hell!”
A gleam of metal from the opened suit-case attracted his eyes. He
took up the kris, and with vast approval studied it. The feel of the
lotus-bud handle seemed grateful to his palm. Its balance joyed him.
The keen, wavy blade, maculated with the rust of blood and brine, and
with the groove where lay another stain whose meaning he knew not, held
for him a singular fascination. Back, forth he slashed the weapon,
whistling it through the air, flashing it under the lamp-light.
“Fine!” he approved, with thickened speech. “Glad I got it—might come
handy in a pinch, what?”
He stopped swinging the kris, and once more observed it, more closely
still. Tentatively he ran his thumb along the edge, testing it, then
scratched with some inchoate curiosity at the poison crystallized in
the groove.
“Wonder what that stuff is, anyhow?” said he. “Doesn’t look like the
rest. Maybe it’s the blood of some P. I., like McLaughlin. _That_ ought
to make a dirty-looking stain, same as this. Maybe it will, some of
these days, if he crosses my bows. Maybe it will at that!”