IV

So all night, lest wind or resolve should fail next day, he sailed. How to

tell just where dawn found him I scarcely know.

Somewhere in that blue wilderness, with no other shore in sight, yet not

over three miles northeast of a "pass" between two long tide-covered sand-

reefs, a ferment of delta silt--if science guesses right--had lifted

higher than most of the islands behind it in the sunken west one mere

islet in the shape of a broad crescent, with its outward curve to seaward

and a deep, slender lagoon on the landward side filling the whole length

of its bight. About half the island was flat and was covered with those

strong marsh grasses for which you've seen cattle, on the mainland,

venture so hungrily into the deep ooze. The rest, the southern half, rose

in dazzling white dunes twenty feet or more in height and dappled green

with patches of ragged sod and thin groups of dwarfed and wind-flattened

shrubs. As the sun rose, Sweetheart and her sailor glided through a gap in

the sand reef that closed the lagoon in, luffed, and as a great cloud of

nesting pelicans rose from their dirty town on the flats, ran softly upon

the inner sands, where a rillet, a mere thread of sweet water, trickled

across the white beach. Here he waded ashore with the utensils and

provisions, made a fire, washed down a hot breakfast of bacon and pone

with a pint of black coffee, returned to his boat and slept until

afternoon. Wakened at length by the canting of the sloop with the fall of

the tide, he rose, rekindled his fire, cooked and ate again, smoked two

pipes, and then, idly shouldering his gun, made a long half-circuit of the

beach to south and eastward, mounted the highest dune and gazed far and

wide.

Nowhere on sand or sea under the illimitable dome was there sign of human

presence on the earth. Nor would there likely be any. Except by

misadventure no ship on any course ever showed more than a topmast above

this horizon. Of the hunters and fishermen who roamed the islands nearer

shore, with the Chandeleurs, the storm-drowned Grand Gosiers and the deep-

sea fishing grounds beyond, few knew the way hither, and fewer ever sailed

it. At the sound of his gun the birds of the beach--sea-snipe, curlew,

plover--showed the whites of their wings for an instant and fell to

feeding again. Save when the swift Wilderness--you remember the revenue

cutter?-chanced this way on her devious patrol, only the steamer of the

light-house inspection service, once a month, came up out of the southwest

through yonder channel and passed within hail on her way from the stations

of the Belize to those of Mississippi Sound; and he knew--had known before

he left the New Basin--that she had just gone by here the day before.

But to Gregory this solitude brought no quick distress. With a bird or two

at his belt he turned again toward his dying fire. Once on the way he

paused, as he came in sight of the sloop, and gazed upon it with a

faintness of heart he had not known since his voyage began. However, it

presently left him, and hurrying down to her side he began to unload her

completely, and to make a permanent camp in the lee of a ridge of sand

crested with dwarfed casino bushes, well up from the beach. The night did

not stop him, and by the time he was tired enough for sleep he had

lightened the boat of everything stowed into her the previous day. Before

sunrise he was at work again, removing her sandbags, her sails, flags,

cordage, even her spars. The mast would have been heavy for two men to

handle, but he got it out whole, though not without hurting one hand so

painfully that he had to lie off for over two hours. But by midday he was

busy again, and when at low water poor Sweetheart comfortably turned upon

her side on the odorous, clean sand, it was never more to rise. The keen,

new axe of her master ended her days.

"No! O no!" he said to me, "call it anything but courage! I felt--I don't

want to be sentimental--I'm sure I was not sentimental at the time, but--I

felt as though I were a murderer. All I knew was that it had to be done. I

trembled like a thief. I had to stoop twice before I could take up the

axe, and I was so cold my teeth chattered. When I lifted the first blow I

didn't know where it was going to fall. But it struck as true as a die,

and then I flew at it. I never chopped so fast or clean in my life. I

wasn't fierce; I was as full of self-delight as an overpraised child. And

yet when something delayed me an instant I found I was still shaking.

Courage," said he, "O no; I know what it was, and I knew then. But I had

no choice; it was my last chance."

I told him that anyone might have thought him a madman chopping up his

last chance.

"Maybe so," he replied, "but I wasn't; it was the one sane thing I could

do;" and he went on to tell me that when night fell the tallest fire that

ever leapt from those sands blazed from Sweetheart's piled ribs and keel.

It was proof to him of his having been shrewd, he said, that for many days

he felt no repentance of the act nor was in the least lonely. There was an

infinite relief merely in getting clean away from the huge world of men,

with all its exactions and temptations and the myriad rebukes and rebuffs

of its crass propriety and thrift. He had endured solitude enough in it;

the secret loneliness of a spiritual bankruptcy. Here was life begun over,

with none to make new debts to except nature and himself, and no

besetments but his own circumvented propensities. What humble, happy

masterhood! Each dawn he rose from dreamless sleep and leaped into the

surf as into the embrace of a new existence. Every hour of day brought

some unfretting task or hale pastime. With sheath-knife and sail-needle he

made of his mainsail a handsome tent, using the mainboom for his ridge-

pole, and finishing it just in time for the first night of rain--when,

nevertheless, he lost all his coffee!

He did not waste toil. He hoarded its opportunities as one might husband

salt on the mountains or water in the desert, and loitering in well

calculated idleness between thoughts many and things of sea and shore

innumerable, filled the intervals from labor to labor with gentle

entertainment. Skyward ponderings by night, canny discoveries under foot

by day, quickened his mind and sight to vast and to minute significancies,

until they declared an Author known to him hitherto only by tradition.

Every acre of the barren islet grew fertile in beauties and mysteries, and

a handful of sand at the door of his tent held him for hours guessing the

titanic battles that had ground the invincible quartz to that crystal meal

and fed it to the sea.

I may be more rhetorical than he was, but he made all the more of these

conditions while experiencing them, because he knew they could not last

out the thirty days, nor half the thirty, and took modest comfort in a

will strong enough to meet all present demands, well knowing there was one

exigency yet to arise, one old usurer still to be settled with who had not

yet brought in his dun.

V

It came--began to come--in the middle of the second week. At its familiar

approach he felt no dismay, save a certain inert dismay that it brought

none. Three, four, five times he went bravely to the rill, drowned his

thirst and called himself satisfied; but the second day was worse than the

first; the craving seemed better than the rill's brief cure of it, and

once he rose straight from drinking of the stream and climbed the dune to

look for a sail.

He strove in vain to labor. The pleasures of toil were as stale as those

of idleness. His books were put aside with a shudder, and he walked abroad

with a changed gait; the old extortioner was levying on his nerves. And on

his brain. He dreamed that night of war times; found himself commander of

a whole battery of heavy guns, and lo, they were all quaker cannon. When

he would have fled, monstrous terrors met him at every turn, till he woke

and could sleep no more. Dawn widened over sky and sea, but its vast

beauty only mocked the castaway. All day long he wandered up and down and

along and across his glittering prison, no tiniest speck of canvas, no

faintest wreath of smoke, on any water's edge; the horror of his isolation

growing-growing?-like the monsters of his dream, and his whole nature wild

with a desire which was no longer a mere physical drought, but a passion

of the soul, that gave the will an unnatural energy and set at naught

every true interest of earth and heaven. Again and again he would have

shrieked its anguish, but the first note of his voice rebuked him to

silence as if he had espied himself in a glass. He fell on his face

voiceless, writhing, and promised himself, nay, pledged creation and its

Creator, that on the day of his return to the walks of men he would drink

the cup of madness and would drink it thenceforth till he died.

When night came again he paced the sands for hours and then fell to work

to drag by long and toiling zigzags to a favorable point on the southern

end of the island the mast he had saved, and to raise there a flag of

distress. In the shortness of his resources he dared not choose the

boldest exposures, where the first high wind would cast it down; but where

he placed it it could be seen from every quarter except the north, and any

sail approaching from that direction was virtually sure to come within

hail even of the voice.

Day had come again as he left the finished task, and once more from the

highest wind-built ridge his hungering eyes swept the round sea's edge.

But he saw no sail. Nerveless and exhausted he descended to the

southeastern beach and watched the morning brighten. The breezes, that for

some time had slept, fitfully revived, and the sun leaped from the sea and

burned its way through a low bank of dark and ruddy clouds with so unusual

a splendor that the beholder was in some degree both quickened and

tranquillized. He could even play at self-command, and in child fashion

bound himself not to mount the dunes again for a northern look within an

hour. This southern half circle must suffice. Indeed, unless these idle

zephyrs should amend, no sail could in that time draw near enough to

notice any signal he could offer.

Playing at self-command gave him some earnest of it. In a whim of the

better man he put off his clothes and sprang into the breakers. He had

grown chill, but a long wrestle with the surf warmed his blood, and as he

reclothed himself and with a better step took his way along the beach

toward his tent a returning zest of manhood refreshed his spirit. The hour

was up, but in a kind of equilibrium of impulses and with much emptiness

of mind, he let it lengthen on, made a fire, and for the first time in two

days cooked food. He ate and still tarried. A brand in his camp fire, a

piece from the remnant of his boat, made beautiful flames. He idly cast in

another and was pleased to find himself sitting there instead of gazing

his eyes out for sails that never rose into view. He watched a third brand

smoke and blaze. And then, as tamely as if the new impulse were only

another part of a continued abstraction, he arose and once more climbed

the sandy hills. The highest was some distance from his camp. At one point

near its top a brief northeastward glimpse of the marsh's outer edge and

the blue waters beyond showed at least that nothing had come near enough

to raise the pelicans. But the instant his sight cleared the crown of the

ridge he rushed forward, threw up his arms, and lifted his voice in a

long, imploring yell. Hardly two miles away, her shapely canvas leaning

and stiffening in the augmented breeze, a small yacht had just gone about,

and with twice the speed at which she must have approached was, hurrying

back straight into the north.

The frantic man dashed back and forth along the crest, tossing his arms,

waving his Madras handkerchief, cursing himself for leaving his gun so far

behind, and again and again repeating his vain ahoys in wilder and wilder

alternations of beseeching and rage. The lessening craft flew straight on,

no ear in her skilled enough to catch the distant cry, and no eye alert

enough to scan the dwindling sand-hills. He ceased to call, but still,

with heavy notes of distress to himself, waved and waved, now here, now

there, while the sail grew smaller and smaller. At length he stopped this

also and only stood gazing. Almost on first sight of the craft he had

guessed that the men in her had taken alarm at the signs of changing

weather, and seeing the freshening smoke of his fire had also inferred

that earlier sportsmen were already on the island. Oh, if he could have

fired one shot when she was nearest! But already she was as hopelessly

gone as though she were even now below the horizon. Suddenly he turned and

ran down to his camp. Not for the gun; not in any new hope of signalling

the yacht. No, no; a raft! a raft! Deliverance or destruction, it should

be at his own hand and should wait no longer!

A raft forthwith he set about to make. Some stout portions of his boat

were still left. Tough shrubs of the sand-hills furnished trennels and

suppler parts. Of ropes there was no lack. The mast was easily dragged

down again to the beach to be once more a mast, and in nervous haste, yet

with skill and thoroughness, the tent was ripped up and remade into a

sail, and even a rude centreboard was rigged in order that one might tack

against unfavorable winds.

Winds, at nightfall, when the thing began to be near completion, there

were none. The day's sky had steadily withdrawn its favor. The sun shone

as it sank into the waves, but in the northwest and southeast dazzling

thunderheads swelled from the sea's line high into the heavens, and in the

early dusk began with silent kindlings to challenge each other to battle.

As night swiftly closed down the air grew unnaturally still. From the

toiler's brow, worse than at noon, the sweat rolled off, as at last he

brought his work to a close by the glare of his leaping camp-fire. Now,

unless he meant only to perish, he must once more eat and sleep while he

might. Then let the storm fall; the moment it was safely over and the wind

in the right quarter he would sail. As for the thirst which had been such

a torture while thwarted, now that it ruled unchallenged, it was purely a

wild, glad zeal as full of method as of diligence. But first he must make

his diminished provisions and his powder safe against the elements; and

this he did, covering them with a waterproof stuff and burying them in a

northern slope of sand.

He awoke in the small hours of the night. The stars of the zenith were

quenched. Blackness walled and roofed him in close about his crumbled

fire, save when at shorter and shorter intervals and with more and more

deafening thunders the huge clouds lit up their own forms, writhing one

upon another, and revealed the awe-struck sea and ghostly sands waiting

breathlessly below. He rose to lay on more fuel, and while he was in the

act the tornado broke upon him. The wind, as he had forecast, came out of

the southeast. In an instant it was roaring and hurtling against the

farther side of his island rampart like the charge of a hundred thousand

horse and tossing the sand of the dunes like blown hair into the

northwest, while the rain in one wild deluge lashed the frantic sea and

weltering lagoon as with the whips of the Furies.

He had kept the sail on the beach for a protection from the storm, but

before he could crawl under it he was as wet as though he had been tossed

up by the deep, and yet was glad to gain its cover from the blinding

floods and stinging sand. Here he lay for more than an hour, the rage of

the tempest continually growing, the heavens in a constant pulsing glare

of lightnings, their terrific thunders smiting and bellowing round and

round its echoing vault, and the very island seeming at times to stagger

back and recover again as it braced itself against the fearful onsets of

the wind. Snuggling in his sailcloth burrow, he complacently recalled an

earlier storm like this, which he and Sweetheart, the only other time they

ever were here, had tranquilly weathered in this same lagoon. On the

mainland, in that storm, cane- and rice-fields had been laid low and half

destroyed, houses had been unroofed, men had been killed. A woman and a

boy, under a pecan tree, were struck by lightning; and three men who had

covered themselves with a tarpaulin on one of the wharves in New Orleans

were blown with it into the Mississippi, poor fellows, and were drowned; a

fact worthy of second consideration in the present juncture.

This second thought had hardly been given it before he crept hastily from

his refuge and confronted the gale in quick alarm. The hurricane was

veering to southward. Let it shift but a point or two more, and its entire

force would sweep the lagoon and its beach. Before long the change came.

The mass of canvas at his feet leapt clear of the ground and fell two or

three yards away. He sprang to seize it, but in the same instant the whole

storm--rain, wind, and sand--whirled like a troop of fiends round the

southern end of the island, the ceaseless lightnings showing the way, and

came tearing and howling up its hither side. The white sail lifted,

bellied, rolled, fell, vaulted into the air, fell again, tumbled on, and

at the foot of a dune stopped until its wind-buffeted pursuer had almost

overtaken it. Then it fled again, faster, faster, higher, higher up the

sandy slope to its top, caught and clung an instant on some unseen bush,

and then with one mad bound into the black sky, unrolled, widened like a

phantom, and vanished forever.

Gregory turned in desperation, and in the glare of the lightning looked

back toward his raft. Great waves were rolling along and across the

slender reef in wide obliques and beating themselves to death in the

lagoon, or sweeping out of it again seaward at its more northern end. On

the dishevelled crest of one he saw his raft, and on another its mast. He

could not look a second time. The flying sand blinded him and cut the

blood from his face. He could only cover his eyes and crawl under the

bushes in such poor lee as he could find; and there, with the first lull

of the storm, heavy with exhaustion and despair, he fell asleep and slept

until far into the day. When he awoke the tempest was over.

Even more completely the tumult within him was quieted. He rose and stood

forth mute in spirit as in speech; humbled, yet content, in the

consciousness that having miserably failed first to save himself and then

to rue himself back to destruction, the hurricane had been his deliverer.

It had spared his supplies, his ammunition, his weapons, only hiding them

deeper under the dune sands; but scarce a vestige of his camp remained and

of his raft nothing. As once more from the highest sand-ridge he looked

down upon the sea weltering in the majestic after-heavings of its passion,

at the eastern beach booming under the shock of its lofty rollers, and

then into the sky still gray with the endless flight of southward-hurrying

scud, he felt the stir of a new attachment to them and his wild prison,

and pledged alliance with them thenceforth.