When Peter Newhall was hurled into that awful sea he had no shadow of a
dream but that this was his last conscious instant. There was no
battling those mountainous waves, and the jagged edges of the cruel
rocks would destroy him in a moment. Yet, as always in the last degree
of crisis, the instant was one of marvelous clarity of thought.
Not merely the physical body strengthens and gathers reserve power in a
crisis. The mental powers are likewise enhanced, encompassing a whole
world in one glance, the breadth of many years in an instant. “It’s the
end,” Peter told himself in one flash of blinding light. He did not even
deign to hope but that those black waters would smother his existence;
that in an instant it would be as if he had never been, his fear of the
law instantly removed, his freedom gained, his crime of the year before
wiped from the slate. He knew no particular regrets so far as he himself
was concerned. In that instant of far vision he felt it was for the
best.
In that instant he thought of Dorothy. Her image was just as plain, just
as vivid in that eerie gray dawn as if he had just left her side. Her
beauty swept him with its old, moving power; her merry eyes that were
sometimes so dark and strange, her dusky skin with its dull, red glow,
the long curves of her lithe form, and the remembered miracle of her
kisses transfigured him now. There was no sequence to these thoughts.
They came in one flash. The enchanted hours that he had spent with her
passed in instantaneous review before him,—those hours before Ivan had
ever appeared with his heavenly music, before the world had come to be
too much with him and with her, the wife at his side. In that terrible
instant his heart cried out to her as it had never done in the fullness
of their happiness. She was his own, his wife, the woman that God had
given him, and he wanted her beyond any reach of words or thought.
One smile from her would redeem him now and save him from the terror of
these icy waters that had even now seized upon him and were battering
him senseless against the crags. In this he was as a child; yet the
terror was not so great that it could blind him to the fact that he was
leaving her alone and unprotected in a world whose trials had proven too
much for him. There was an abiding quality of strength in him yet—for
all these last months of debauchery—and his last impulse was in prayer
for her. He wanted her destiny to be serene; his last breath of vivid
consciousness before he felt the first, shattering impact of his body
against the crags was given to her, wholly and without reservation. He
wanted the world to be kind to the girl who had sheltered in his arms.
He did not pray for himself. He had not yet gathered wisdom to know that
even these mountainous waves were not too mighty to be stilled by
prayer. If he himself had dwelt in his own thoughts at all, it was only
that when the time was ripe and his wanderings were done he could come
back to her, if only in the night and on the wind.
The first blow against the crags almost knocked him unconscious;
thereafter the struggle in that tempestuous sea was like a gray dream.
Indeed, the grayness of dawn lay over the waters, dim against the dark,
spray-wet crags; he was aware of its presence in some strange, vague
under-consciousness that the horror of impending death could not ruffle
or disturb. The waves caught him again, held him up, then like a wild
beast hurled him head-first toward the jagged rocks.
Instinctively he threshed about in the water to save the killing impact
on his head, but he was only partially able to break the force of the
blow. The knife edge of the crag sliced down across his face, gouging
and tearing as it went, and through the inner passages to his ears he
heard his jawbone crack apart. Again the waves caught him, lifting him
high, and again he was sped forward swift as a dolphin dashing through
green water.
The force of this wave was too mighty to resist. His momentum was such,
the pressure of the water so great behind him, that he was paralyzed and
helpless in an instant. Half-conscious, he waited for the shattering
blow that would mean the end.
But it did not come. The wave spent itself; then, as it rolled back,
dropped him on gray, smooth rocks that were lifted above the water. In
that dim instant he saw the gray line of the shore not a hundred feet
beyond.
The waves had carried him, as if by miracle, through a gap in the reefs.
Instantly a fighting spirit welled back in him: if he could hold on,
keep consciousness a moment more, he might easily be washed ashore. It
was merely the primitive instinct to survive that commanded him now: the
will to live and cool, human intelligence were both lost to him with the
broader aspects of his consciousness. He was bleeding, horribly
mutilated; yet he began to fight like a tiger in a trap.
The waves caught him again, lifted him up, and he fought hard against
them to avoid the full power of the shattering blow when they laid him
down. He was fifty feet nearer now, and as the wave went out, he
struggled ahead to avoid being inundated by the next wave. And almost at
once he was staggering on the shore, saved as if by miracle, in the icy,
brightening dawn.
From that moment he had no doubt of his continued life. He knew
perfectly that this was a wild, uninhabited land and that a few moments
of exposure to the cold would end his life certainly as a hangman’s
noose; yet the miracle that had brought him through the reefs would not
stop here. He had not been saved from the cruel fangs of the rocks to
perish miserably from exposure on the shore; the destiny that had spared
him would also find means to shelter him. His injuries were serious, but
they would not be fatal if any help at all could be found, and without
help he would perish anyway from the cold.
Still in his half-dream he shook the salt water from his eyes and looked
about him. It did not surprise him that a ship should be lying just
without the reefs, tugging at her strong, anchor chain, or that closer
view should reveal a stout dory manned with a full crew that had
evidently been launched in an attempt to rescue drowning men. At first
no reasonable explanation for her presence occurred to him: it was
simply part of the miracle that had borne him alive through the reefs.
Yet in a moment he had guessed the truth: that this was a wandering
trader who had answered the same appeal for help that had sped the
_Jupiter_ to her destruction.
The ship they had come to save was beyond the reach of help. She was a
small, auxiliary schooner; the dawn showed part of her stern and her
broken, floating masts where she had gone down. Of the _Jupiter_ there
was nothing whatever to be seen. The dory, in instant danger of being
overwhelmed, rode just outside a wide gap in the reefs and a quarter of
a mile below, holding such a position that she would strike the sloping
beach, rather than the rocks, in case she was blown into shore. There
were no other survivors on the length of the beach that his eyes could
span.
He did not believe his rescue could be accomplished for some moments at
least, so he took the only possible course to keep the blood moving in
his veins,—he got to his feet and struggled up and down the shore. The
fact that the exercise caused a more active flow from his wounds could
not be taken into consideration; it was better to risk death from loss
of blood than to die swiftly and surely from freezing. But already the
men in the dory had seen him and were trying to push into the little
cove between the reefs. Still he ran back and forth, only
half-conscious.
* * * * *
Blond, rugged men had gathered about him and were ministering to him
when the last of his dim consciousness departed. He had no shadow of
remembrance of being borne to the dory, rowed out to the ship, and
hoisted aboard; but the strong, rugged engine of his life wakened him to
sharp realization of a certain, ghastly business transpiring in the
cabin. When he opened his eyes he was on a clean bunk, and a little
group of men—none of whom he could ever remember seeing before—were
working about him.
It took some little time to tell what they were doing. One of them, he
guessed presently, was acting as ship’s doctor: his hands were scrubbed
till the skin was pink, he wore a white apron, and his look was very
businesslike. He was talking quietly with two of the ship’s officers as
he sterilized a set of villainous-looking surgeon’s tools.
Their conversation drifted faintly to Peter’s ears. “Dis is quite a
fe’der in your cap, Bill,” one of the sailors was saying in the
good-humored, subdued voice that is the peculiar characteristic of a
certain great breed of seafarers. Peter did not have to glance at the
blond head or the blue eyes of the speaker to know his race; his accent
and his voice revealed it plainly. There is an old saying, at sea, that
anywhere in the world a man may roam he can still find three familiar
things: one of them is a sea gull and the second a Norwegian sailor, but
the third one must go to sea to learn. The first two, at least, held
good here: he guessed at once that three-fourths of the crew, if not
all, were Norwegians; and the ship was not yet so far out to sea but
that the gulls cried plaintively in her wake.
“I know it’s a pretty big job for my skill,” Bill answered promptly. “If
there was a real M. D. on the boat or within a thousand miles I wouldn’t
tackle it—though I’ve tackled some pretty stiff jobs, and got away with
’em, too, my years at sea. If I don’t work on that face he’ll be a
monster to look at the rest of his life. I really think I can help
him—I believe if he was conscious he’d tell me to go ahead.”
Peter opened his eyes again, and one glance at the intelligent face, the
strong, capable, well-scrubbed hands, restored his confidence. “I’m
conscious,” he said thickly. His jaw wobbled as he tried to enunciate.
“Go ahead.”
The sailors looked at him with no great amazement. “That’s another
complication—that you’re conscious,” Bill returned. “We haven’t any
anesthetic.”
“Go ahead, anyway. My face hasn’t any feeling in it, at all. It feels
numb.”
“I’m afraid it won’t be numb when I get to work on it. But we’re a
thousand miles from a real surgeon, and you’ve got to have help. I’ll be
as easy as I can.”
Bill went to work,—to the absolute limit of his skill. He stitched
great, ugly cuts, he bandaged loose, torn strips of flesh, he tied
bleeding veins, he fastened again—with some deftness—a torn eyelid
that was the result of a long cut that passed diagonally across his face
and which had broken the bone of the nose, and he tried his best to set
the broken jaw. Through it all Peter clenched his hands, bit the wedge
that Bill had placed between his jaws, and said nothing. He had learned,
in the North, that there are many things of less wisdom than silence.
This is one of the teachings of the waste places.
His torn nerves sustained him until the end, until the last wound was
washed and repaired to the best of Bill’s ability. Because he dropped
immediately to sleep thereafter he did not hear the terse compliment
that Bill paid him,—blunt words that would have pleased him more than
any specious flattery in the days of his glory.
“The boy’s got guts,” Bill had said with emphasis.
Stabbing, burning pain in his jaws and face woke Peter late in the
night; and he was somewhat surprised to find Bill sitting at his
bed-side. “Don’t try to talk,” the latter cautioned quickly. “I don’t
think you can if you tried, with that bandage around your jaw. You won’t
do any talking for some weeks, my boy. But I can see you’re better.”
Peter managed to grin wanly and moved his hand as if in the act of
writing. Bill understood promptly.
“I’ll get you a piece of paper in a minute. It’s lucky for you you know
how to read and write. I’ve got to look at some of those bandages first,
though.” He slipped off some of the stained white strips, sterilized the
wounds, and put on fresh bandages. “Just doing fine, so far,” he gloated
with professional pride. “Those fancy army surgeons couldn’t do prettier
work than that on a messed-up human face. You won’t look like you, but
you’ll look like something. You wanted a piece of paper? Wait a second.”
He laid the back of an envelope on the rail of the bunk and put a pencil
in Peter’s hand. The latter wrote simply like the seafaring man he was
coming to be.
“‘What ship and where bound?’” Bill read aloud. “Naturally, you would be
interested in that. This is the auxiliary schooner _Dolly Bettis_,
sailed from Naknek for Siberia. But don’t worry—we’ll be back to
Unalaska in six months, and from there to ’Frisco. I hope you haven’t
got any pressing engagements.”
Peter grinned in his bandages, and at the cost of some pain shook his
head.
“Good. Don’t want to be put off if we meet any one?”
The castaway indicated “no” again.
“Then we’ll be shipmates for some time. The captain’ll be glad to sign
you up; though you haven’t the hands of a seafaring man, there’s always
something you can do. What do they call you?”
Peter took the paper again and started to write Peter Neville, the name
he had gone under—the few times he had had occasion to give his
name—during his residence in the native village. But he halted before
he had completed the first word. A sudden, deeply moving thought flashed
like a light in his mind.
He was hardly aware that Bill had picked up the paper. “Pete, eh,” he
read. He had no idea but that the man had written all he had intended to
write, and was not in the least surprised. Many men, in this remote end
of the North, go by first names only; and it is not considered the best
manners to inquire too closely as to what the family name might be. They
were man to man, and Bill had no desire to embarrass his friend. He
seemed perfectly matter-of-fact and grinned in a friendly way.
“Limejuice Pete!”
Limejuice Pete! Bill went out and left this Southern aristocrat to
ponder on the interesting situation in which he found himself.