Dawn suddenly broke upon a sea snarling under the lash of a heavy
northeasterly. Emily Granville, her eyes pressed against the blackness,
saw it as from a mountain peak. The next instant she was hurtling,
twisting downward through space, sightless; her breath stopped.
The sensation of falling ceased. There was a hardly perceptible pause
amid a stinging smother of spray and then came the sensation of being
lifted--of rising swiftly. She caught a breath and opened her eyes; and
again from a seeming great height she beheld in awe the youth of the day
striding across an angry waste of waters.
The terrific buffeting of the boat, under the gunwale of which she
crouched, had been going on for hours. Until this moment she had been
only dimly conscious of it because the darkness gives one no background;
no line of contrast by which the mind may measure its impressions. One
thought only had lived persistently: that her reason might leave her. It
still endured. But the human mind installed in a normal, healthy body
like hers does not break so easily. No one becomes insane quickly any
more than one becomes a thief quickly. A long process of decay must
precede.
As Emily's body readjusted itself to the cockleshell's wild movements
her senses began to recover their power of apprehension. She realized
that she was clutching a hand--a hand she remembered snatching out of
the night as the vortex of the sinking _Cambodia_ seemed about to suck
the boat down to the deeps. Through the eternity of blackness which had
passed its touch had been her link to sentient life. She held it up now
and saw that it was the hand of a strong man, with a strange ring of
green jade upon it. The hand closed upon hers gently and trustfully.
Then, she became aware that a weight was upon her limbs and she looked
down. A man's head lay in her lap just free of the foaming wash in the
boat's bottom. It was the hand of this man that she clasped and that was
clasping hers tightly. She bent closer, with a new fear starting in her
heart for the face was very white. A stronger volume of light shot into
the heavens. It was the man Whitridge--Lavelle!
The boat plunged from the crest of a gray-backed comber and ended its
descent with a racking jerk. Emily Granville was thrown across Lavelle,
her face pressed against his spray-wet lips. She struggled to draw away,
but the sea, as if in mockery, held her close to this man and weltered
them in its spume.
When the boat rose again she straightened with a shudder. A wave of
horror mixed with hateful revulsion swept over her. She tried to pull
herself away from him, but the weight of his head and shoulders and a
woman cowering at her side pinned her down. She freed one of her hands,
but Lavelle's held the other in a grip which her strength could not
break.
Then, gradually, her natural spirit of justice and humanity assumed
rule, overcoming even what had been almost an obsession since
childhood--her repugnance of physical contact. The water in the boat was
so deep that she realized that if she put this man's head away from her
lap it must sink. Perhaps he was dying--perhaps death had already
claimed him and as this thought came to her she saw the open wound in
his brow just back of another jagged scar.
The humility of shame bowed her head and her eyes filled with tears.
This man had suffered this wound for her sake; he had come to her in the
night when all hope had gone; he had snatched her from the clutches of
wild beasts, who had shot him down even as he laid her in this boat. It
was because of him that she lived.
She felt a tremor pass from Lavelle's body into hers. His lips parted
with a sigh and he murmured something wearily. Then, his eyes opened for
a second. He looked up into her face with the glance of a tired child,
yet without recognition, and her heart gave a sudden fearful throb. She
thought it was pity and knew it not for the stirring of the eternal
motherhood that is in all women.
A gust of wind swept Emily's thick plaits of golden hair across his face
and his eyes closed again, the while a faint smile flickered across his
lips like one returning to a pleasant dream. He snuggled his head closer
against the thigh which was numb from pillowing it and the woman did not
move.
Chang, looking down from where he stood over them in the stern, like a
giant in bronze, nursing the boat up to a sea anchor, alone had glimpsed
what had happened. He shouted something which Emily could not
understand. Stooping quickly he slipped a hand through Lavelle's
tattered shirt.
"More better," he said. "Him heart move. Him live--you live. Sab-bee?"
The Chinaman's glance and the forceful nod of his head conveyed a
meaning greater than his words. They implied a task for her
performance--the doing of what was in her power to do for this man.
A horrifying cry from forward straightened the giant in a flash. One
glance ahead and he gave the big steering oar a mighty sweep. He seemed
to lift the boat bodily out of the water. A stream of orders poured from
his lips and electrified every bit of life in the cockleshell, save that
in Lavelle.
It took but a glimpse overside to transport these sea waifs from their
horror of the night into a terror of the day. Elsie of Shanghai started
from Emily's side into a sitting posture only to hide her head again. A
man with a pointed black beard rose to his knees between the second and
third thwarts and gazed round him in terror. Two of the three Chinese in
the bows seized oars and stood like warders at a gate.
The boat was riding in a mass of planks and railroad ties--the deckload
of the stranger which had sent the _Cambodia_ to the bottom. Every sea
was armed and eager with death. Some carried their bludgeons and clubs
openly; others hid them under their white-crested capes, flashing them
out treacherously and suddenly as the boat rode wildly to the assault.
The sides and bottom of the boat would have been no more than paper
under the slightest blow from a piece of this wreckage: a touch and
every life in it would have been flotsam. Hunger, thirst, and the
terrors of the night were forgotten in the menace of the battle which
the yellow giant at the steering oar captained with a master hand.
The white man, kneeling between the thwarts, began shouting orders and
warnings. Chang, his thick cue streaming in the wind, his jaw set, his
face as expressionless as a piece of parchment, seemed oblivious of what
this white man did until he saw him start to heave his big form to a
standing position. Then he hurled a curse at him that was like a blow--a
curse learned of the sea and white men's lips.
But to the women the giant kept calling, "Bimeby him all go way!" and
there was faith in his voice and it passed into their hearts. As often
as the boat shuddered from an assault cheated of its death strength he
abjured them to be unafraid. No white man could have been more gentle or
thoughtful.
Through it all Emily Granville clung to Lavelle's hand as she had in the
night. What the Chinaman had said kept forcing itself uppermost in her
mind--if the man who lay across her lived, all would live.
Even as Chang had promised the boat passed out of the wreckage. The wind
dropped suddenly and peace began its entrance into the sea's worried
blue bosom. The sun, leaping to its day's work overhead, touched the
boat with its warmth. Emily, following Chang's glance round the horizon,
saw a speck away to leeward. It might be another boat he told her.
"Hi!" cried one of the coolies forward, pointing up to windward where
the broken half of a boat went by.
"No good look him that way!" shouted Chang, but too late. Emily and
Shanghai Elsie saw the grim sea grist and the body of a little boy in
pajamas tangled in it. Their eyes met--the Magdalen's and hers of the
sheltered life--and they wept together, cheek against cheek, in an
understanding of woman's heritage of potential motherhood.
In the midst of Chang's tongue-lashing of the coolie who had discovered
the wrecked boat, Lavelle stirred into consciousness. Elsie was the
first to see his eyes open and stare upward blankly.
"Thank God he is living," she murmured. "Thank God!" and as she spoke
he sat up with a start, tearing his hand from Emily's. He gazed round
him wildly for a moment, his eyes finally settling on Emily with a gleam
of recognition.
"You," he murmured in a tone of awe. Chang's chattering went unheeded.
He passed a hand across his brow and at the touch the bullet wound over
his temple began to bleed afresh. His head rocked with pain and he
pressed it in both hands until it seemed that he must crush the skull.
"Don't, don't," Emily protested, but he did not hear her. "You would
better----You are ill. Lie down again, please."
"Somebody struck me----Oh, yes--they shot me. I don't know--I don't know
why," and a low moan escaped from him.
The Shanghai woman begged him to lie down again, but he shook his head.
He looked at his hands. They were wet with blood. Then he began to
examine his shirt for something with which to bind his brow. It was
sleeveless; the arms had been ripped out of the pits; the body of it was
in ribbands.
"If I had something--to tie----" Lavelle began, and then called Chang.
"I have nothing" said Elsie, conscious for the first time that she had
escaped from the _Cambodia_ in only a black satin kimono and the flimsy
silken nightdress which it covered. Even as she spoke Emily struggled up
from the bottom of the boat to the fore-and-aft seat against which her
head had been resting. With a splendid unconsciousness of self she
opened the long tan coat--the one in which Lavelle had first beheld
her--raised an outer black skirt and with a swift movement ripped off
the deep hem of the night robe which it hid.
Lavelle was facing away from her, but he opened his eyes at that moment
to see the strange man seated in front of him start up, with a smile of
strange curiousness in his dark face. Emily saw this smile, too, with
disgust, and hesitated in her purpose. Then she leaned toward Lavelle
and said quickly:
"If you will bend back your head--a little."
He leaned toward her obediently and she bandaged the wound with an
efficiency that brought nods of approval from Elsie and Chang, both
ignorant of this woman's latent powers of hardy usefulness and physical
capacity--the heritage of a pioneer stock that had torn a world out of a
wilderness.
"I thank you," said Lavelle simply and he faced her. "Just as soon as I
get this blood pressure out of my head I will--things will be all
right." She saw his jaw muscles flex with the pain which tore at him,
and his thoughts were of the kindness and the bigness of heart that
would let this woman touch him. She felt his eyes sweep over her from
her slippered bare feet to the crown of her head, but there was
something impersonal in his glance which cooled the resentment which
flushed to her cheeks. It was not like the glance of the bearded man
down between the thwarts.
It was this man speaking loudly and in a strange foreign accent, which
she had unmarked before, that turned Lavelle away from her.
"We cannot be lying here idly like this," he was saying to Lavelle. He
stood up as he spoke and threw a leg over the after thwart.
"Who are you?" asked Lavelle quietly.
"If you had been about the ship you would know, Mr. Lavelle," he
sneered. "For your information I am Orloff Rowgowskii. I am a seaman--an
officer--and I will take charge here. These ladies are intrusted in my
charge."
Not a muscle of Lavelle's face moved. He spoke over his shoulder to
Chang. He asked Chang something in Chinese only to have the giant blaze
over his head angrily at the man who called himself Rowgowskii:
"Whachamalla you? What for! You clay-zee?"
The coolie drew the steering oar inboard, for it was now nearly a dead
calm. A shake of Lavelle's head silenced his angry chatter instantly.
"My serang--Chang there tells me this is his boat; that he has been in
command since we abandoned the ship."
"Yes," interrupted Elsie, pausing in wringing the water from her
streaming black hair. "We wouldn't have been here now if it hadn't been
for that Canton coolie." She broke off quickly in Chinese and spoke to
Chang.
"He is a very good sailor--a very good sailor," said Rowgowskii. "He
will be of use--and I will use you, too, Lavelle--properly, if you
behave. If not----" He shrugged his shoulders. "I have the means to
enforce obedience." He glanced from Lavelle toward Emily and Elsie. "We
shall have order here, ladies, and----You may trust me." From them he
turned to Chang. "Tell those men to get that sea anchor aboard and set
that sail."
"My flen, you more better sit down. Huh! You may get kill," said Chang.
"Mutiny already!" exclaimed Rowgowskii, straightening and with his hand
going toward his hip.
"My God! aren't we miserable enough!" shrieked the Shanghai woman.
Terror locked Emily's lips.
"Don't," said Lavelle quietly, but in a tone fraught with menace.
"Get up out of that and go to your work!" snarled Rowgowskii, and he
whipped out a revolver.
In that instant Lavelle rose like a rattler from a coil. There was a
crunching of bone against bone as his fist landed full in Rowgowskii's
face and sent him spinning overboard. The weapon spun in the air and
fell at Emily's feet.
Lavelle staggered from the force of his blow. His eyes closed and he put
his hands to his brow. He would have fallen if it had not been for
Chang, who caught him and stretched him along the seat opposite Emily.
There he swooned.
Emily shrank forward and away from him in terror. This was the Lavelle
of the _Yakutat_ who filled her dreams; this the brute who had shadowed
her childhood and filled her nights with fearful shapes.
"What a fiend, what a fiend," she whispered to the Shanghai woman.
"He's a white man--you don't know--you don't understand," Elsie answered
and raised a barrier between them with the words.
Both women, looking over the side, saw Rowgowskii swimming desperately
toward the sea anchor. His cries for aid went unheeded by either Chang
or the three coolies who were cowering in the bows. Chang picked up the
revolver from the bottom of the boat. The act was portentous.
"For God's love!" cried Elsie, beginning an appeal which trailed off
into an outburst in the Chinese tongue.
Chang shook his head obdurately. He nodded toward Lavelle.
"They're going to let him drown," she told Emily hysterically. "Weren't
enough drowned last night? This Chinaman will not do anything unless
Captain Whitridge tells him."
"Him bad man. More better die," said Chang to Emily.
Again there was a cry from Rowgowskii and the boat moved with a quick
jerk as he caught hold of the anchor drogue.
These cries brought to Emily Granville a memory so poignant and vivid
that action was born of the shock. She moved swiftly from the Shanghai
woman's side and shook Lavelle by the shoulder.
"Tell these Chinamen--tell them not to let this man drown!" she cried at
him.
Lavelle sat up with a moan. His head dropped forward.
"Don't you hear? Haven't you murdered enough already? Are you altogether
a fiend? Hear him crying now!"
Lavelle straightened. She shrank from the glance he leveled upon her. It
was defiant, fearless, burning with challenge.
"I never----" His lips, forming in a tense straight line, cut the speech
off sharply at the breath of another word. The old look of pain came
into his eyes--the pain she had seen there when he stood at the desk in
the steamship agency--and he turned away.
Rowgowskii had crawled along the drogue and was hanging now to the bow.
Lavelle hurled an angry order in Chinese at the coolies forward and they
sprang to their feet. They dragged Rowgowskii aboard and dropped him in
an exhausted, shivering heap.
Chang moved aft to where Lavelle sank wearily on the seat built against
the air-tank casing and handed him the revolver. He began an apology.
"More better him dead," he said, and Lavelle silenced him with one word
that made the giant cower beside him like a dog under a lash.
Emily, seeing this, wondered, for she recalled, with a shudder, the
fierceness of this big yellow man in the night.