Limejuice Pete! It did not surprise Peter Newhall that Bill should take
him for an Englishman. He was a pure Anglo-Saxon to start with, his
features had suggested those of the better class of Britishers, but
mostly Bill got the idea from his Southern accent,—an accent with which
the crew of the _Dolly Bettis_ was entirely unfamiliar but which,
because it was nothing else they knew, became English by the process of
elimination. And it did sound something like it—changed as it had been
by his broken jaw—the softening of the R’s and the drawling of the
vowels. Limejuice Pete he was henceforth. Fortunately he had once taken
a walking, ale-drinking tour through the British Isles, and he knew
enough of the country to stand by his guns.
He wondered if he could leave Peter Newhall, the murderer of Paul
Sarichef, behind him for good and all. The thought transfigured him.
Could it be that, in this new guise, he could shake off his past, even
his old individuality, and get a new start in the world of men?
He scrutinized his situation with the greatest care; and he soon arrived
at a most interesting conclusion. There was no doubt but that he had
vanished from his known world, not only the Peter Newhall whom he had
been in Augusta, but the Pete Neville by which the natives had known him
in the lost village of the Peninsula. The squaws would not see him again
go reeling down the path between the huts. No one who knew him had seen
his miraculous rescue from the beach. Except for one thing, one fatal
obstacle, he might be free from the pursuing hand of the law for ever
after.
It was true that he was the single survivor of the wreck of the
_Jupiter_. But it was also tragically true that no one in the world of
men behind him knew that he was aboard the _Jupiter_ in the first place.
If one single native had seen him board the cannery boat, the world
would soon believe that Peter Neville was dead. In his shack they would
find proof of his real identity, and word would go out that Peter
Neville, drowned in the wreck of the _Jupiter_ was in reality Peter
Newhall, and thus the law would never seek him further. The fact that
his body would not be recovered would scarcely be a factor in that case:
the sea but rarely gives up its dead. As it was, no living man that
could give testimony knew that he had been on the _Jupiter_, and it was
not likely that his disappearance would be connected up with her wreck.
At least, there would always be an uncertainty—and the unhappy
consequences of that uncertainty were that the law would always watch
for him—half-heartedly, perhaps, but yet intently enough to destroy his
peace of mind—and that he was exiled to the little-known, uncivilized
ends of the world until his death.
Only the crew of the _Dolly Bettis_ knew that there was a survivor from
the disaster of the reefs. In order that the whole world should be made
to believe that Peter Newhall, alias Peter Neville, had gone down on the
_Jupiter_ he must tell his shipmates that he, Limejuice Pete, had been
aboard and was a survivor of the auxiliary schooner that had sunk among
the reefs, the ship that the unfortunate _Jupiter_ had gone forth to
save. No one living, so far as he knew, could contradict his story. Thus
the world would believe that every one aboard the _Jupiter_ was lost,
Peter Newhall of course among them.
While it was not secure, at least his situation was more favorable than
ever before. He had disappeared, and none of his Alaskan acquaintances
knew whence he had gone. If they thought him dead—which was at least
possible—he would have a better chance to live his life safe from the
hand of the law and its ever-watchful servants.
The fact gave him new heart. He was free from immediate danger of
capture, and the haunting fear of arrest—the rending shock to his
nervous system at every new face in the village and at every utterance
of his name, and the shadow of the gallows across his path day and
night—could be forgotten. He resolved to get up as soon as possible,
take his place in the crew of the ship, and get what companionship he
could from his shipmates. He would not pay for his passage; in the first
place it might arouse suspicion of him—men of the class he was supposed
to be do not pay for steamboat tickets when they can work their way—and
in the second, the hard work on the deck might fill up the long days and
give him some shadow of happiness. He would not take to the whisky
bottle again at once. That wild, half-mad dream was ended.
His resolution to make the best of a bad situation was strengthened the
first day he was allowed to come out upon the deck. It was not that he
could begin pulling ropes at once. His strength was no more than that of
a child; his diet of liquid and half-liquid food—strong broth, olive
oil, raw eggs and canned milk—had taken him down, stripping away his
spare flesh and paling his flushed cheeks. But soon he could begin to
chew hardtack again. His jawbone was setting: indeed, all his wounds
were healing without the least indication of dangerous complications. He
was already able to talk through the lips that before had been so torn
and lacerated.
He gazed down into the dark-green depths and watched the incredibly
graceful flight of the petrels that followed the ship. They had an old
appeal to his race,—these wastes of troubled waters. They moved and
stirred the best part of him. They might strip him down, try him,
sometimes torture him, but in the end the good metal would be left and
the slag discarded.
Ten days thereafter he was well enough to begin his first light tasks
aboard ship; and the captain signed him up. This proceeding was not
without an element of humor: the Southern gentleman signed the name
“Pete Limejuicer” with a flourish. The captain grinned widely, then
assigned him a shift on the paint detail that is always busy on
shipboard.
He soon found that cruelty and slave-driving did not exist aboard the
_Dolly Bettis_, nor was it common on any modern ship commanded by white
men. No mates kicked him as he went to his watch, no belaying pins
smashed him to the earth, and the captain’s tone, though brusque, was
ever so much more decent and polite than that of many newly made
lieutenants in the army training camps. Indeed, the old man—as the
sailors called him—expected nothing of him that was beyond reason. As
the days passed he broke him in slowly to the harder tasks; but he was
never taxed beyond his rapidly growing strength, and he took into
consideration the fact that Pete’s long weeks of obvious dissipation had
made serious inroads in his constitution.
His wounds healed, his jaw and the bone of his nose were sound again,
and now the blond hair had begun to lengthen and mat about his lips and
jowls. Because it was gradual, he did not at first realize the
tremendous, incredible change in his appearance since the night of the
wreck. In the first place health and decent habits had mostly eradicated
the revolting signs of dissipation. His eyes were clear, no longer
bloodshot and thin; the flesh of his face was firm rather than swollen
and soft; he was a deep, good brown instead of pasty white, and the
network of red lines at his cheek bones was no longer manifest. But this
was only the beginning. His burly form had stripped down until he
weighed but one hundred and sixty pounds, and now he had started to gain
slowly as his muscles hardened to iron. This change alone was
stupendous: he no longer gave the impression of being heavily built.
Rather he looked lean, loosely hung, instead of rigid and stolid; his
head and neck and back were wholly changed. And, as the months passed,
there came to be other, less pronounced changes which, because they were
subtle, would have gone farther to conceal his identity than any mere
loss or gain in flesh,—particularly those of his carriage. His muscles
were loose and he moved like a cat, with pronounced grace, and besides,
he soon acquired that queer, rolling gait of a sailor that would remain
with him until death. His hands—always a certain means of
identification—broadened and strengthened and grew from the constant
pulling and tugging at ropes; before they had half completed the cruise,
they had begun to look like real seamen’s hands, calloused, blunt,
weather-beaten and skin-cracked, and certainly as powerful as vises of
iron.
But these changes were all minor ones compared to the complete
transformation of his face. Bill’s surgical work had been a huge success
as far as repairing his disfiguration, but in so doing he had completely
concealed the man’s identity. He was as changed as if he wore a mask.
Before he had had a rather full, extremely youthful face. Now it was
lean, the cheek bones showed, the chin was prominent, the eyes looked
larger, more luminous and clear, and much more sober. New lines had come
in his brow, his nose was irregular, no longer finely chiseled; his
mouth no longer looked small and rather pursed but large and humorous.
He was no longer handsome, not from any pronounced disfiguration, but
simply because of the new set of his features and, perhaps, the presence
of a few telltale scars. His hair had only been faintly touched with
gray before the disaster; the last months of distress and dissipation
had shot it full of silver. Finally his voice was completely changed in
tone since the fracture of his jaw; it was still rich and full, and the
differences were such as could not be narrated in words, yet the ear
would never recognize it as Peter Newhall’s voice. Besides, he spoke
more slowly than was his former custom—he was given to long silences,
to careful, deliberate choice of words. There was nothing left—so far
as externals went—of the man he had been.
Before that long cruise was done, he found a certain simple pleasure in
the sailor’s life, in holding his place as a man among men. The hardest
tasks on the boat did not appall him now. His hands were like iron, his
muscles untiring. He liked the regular hours, the plain, abundant food,
the hours of easy speech with his shipmates on watch. He did not,
however, intend to follow the seafarer’s life, for the simple reason
that he knew it would sooner or later carry him into danger. When he
returned to Alaska he would get some kind of an outdoor job at one of
the canneries where he would be mostly out of touch with civilization
and the law. When too much loneliness drove his fellows to the cities
below he would patiently wait for their return.
The life crowned by Dorothy he had lived in the South must be resolutely
shut from his mind: that was the greatest price he paid for his
drink-mad crime of two years before. Yet the wind never blew from the
south but that he thought of her, and sleep never came to him—no matter
how hard his day of toil—but that the empty space beside him filled him
with poignant longing. Her beauty was like a glorious dream to him now,
remembered in all its fullness, but beyond belief that it was once his.
The loveliness, the beauty, the ineffable tenderness of those early
months of their marriage redeemed and glorified him yet, lost as he was
in these wastes of foam-crested waters, under this empty sky.
The boat touched at Unalaska on the return trip, but because the ends of
the earth fore-gathered here—because it was the meeting place for the
wayfarers that came and passed through this empty, far-off edge of the
East—he wisely decided to stay on board. But he would not continue on
down to San Francisco, and thus into the toils of the law. The captain
had agreed to put him off at one of the native villages, farther down
the Peninsula.
Two days’ sail from Unalaska a broken part forced the _Dolly Bettis_
into a little settlement in the Shumagin Islands; and when the ship had
fastened to the dock for repairs Pete found, to his consternation, that
he was in Squaw Harbor, instantly remembered as the home port of the
_Jupiter_. For the moment he was shaken with fear. Although his old
stamping ground was on the other side of the Peninsula, the fame of the
Remittance Man had carried down this far; and likely there were men here
who would recognize him as Peter Neville. His disappearance would be
common knowledge throughout this part of Alaska; every one here would be
on the lookout for him. His first instinct was to duck below and remain
in hiding.
But already that chance was gone. As he turned, he ran squarely upon two
men who had just encircled the pilot house; one of them was his captain,
and the other Aleck Bradford, the superintendent of the cannery, and the
last man on earth whom he wanted to see now. It just happened that he
had got rather well acquainted with Bradford soon after his flight
north: they had met in Unga; they had education and breeding in common,
and Bradford had once offered him the hospitality of the little bachelor
lodge he had built at the edge of the sea. It seemed inconceivable that
the latter should pass him without recognition. Peter’s heart leaped as
the man walked by without a glance.
But he was not safe yet. The captain was immediately behind Bradford,
and he stopped Pete with an outstretched hand.
There had been few more terrifying seconds in Pete’s life. His entire
nervous system was shaken to the core: he firmly believed, except for
the training of nerve and muscle he had undergone in these past months
at sea, he straightway would have fainted. The thought that flashed
through his mind was of course that Bradford and the captain had already
talked over his case, had established his identity from papers left in
his cabin, and that he was under arrest.
He halted, breathless and deathly pale under his brown wind-tan and
sunburn; and one glance at the captain’s face told him that he had
simply been the victim of a bad conscience. The officer’s eyes were
friendly: indeed he seemed less aloof, more companionable than ever
before. “Come here, Aleck,” he said easily to the man in front. Bradford
turned with no look other than friendly interest. “Meet Pete—Limejuice
Pete to his friends. Pete, this is Mr. Bradford, of the cannery.” The
manner of their introduction showed that there was a wide social gap
between them—nothing that was not justified, however, by their
ostensible positions in life—and Bradford’s smile and handclasp were
cordial. “Pete, Mr. Bradford has the biggest run of Reds he ever had in
his life in a new trap he was crafty enough to find, and he’s in need of
some good labor. You were going to get off up here a ways anyhow—why
don’t you ask for a job here with Mr. Bradford?”
Until this moment Peter had never realized how completely his appearance
had been changed. Now, as Bradford gazed straight at him without even a
hint of recognition, with no sign that this bearded sailor even recalled
any one he had met, the fugitive’s self-confidence mounted like a flame.
“I’d be mighty glad to work here,” he said quietly, “if Mr. Bradford can
use me.”
“I can use you, all right. I’ll put you on the web-crew at the usual
wages. I’ve never quite caught up with myself since I lost so many of my
best men in the _Jupiter_ disaster. By the way, Cap’n, you were standing
by when that happened.”
“Yes. We’d gone to help the _Vigten_—same as your boat, I guess. Pete,
here, was on the _Vigten_—the single survivor. If you want to know
about that wreck, ask him. Of course, we put out a boat and cruised
around until there was no hope of finding any one else alive—then went
on without waiting for the dead to drift ashore. We picked up Pete more
or less alive on the shore, and how he got through those reefs was a
miracle. We saw, just dimly in the dawn, the _Jupiter_ break up, but she
was too far away for us to help. This is sure a ship’s graveyard—these
hellish, Western Alaskan waters. How many men did you lose on the
_Jupiter_ when she went down?”
“All aboard, as you know—six of my men, a stranger from Nushagak whose
body was never recovered—his name turned out to be Larson—and that
chap that used to go as Peter Neville—we called him the Remittance Man,
and he lived in a native village on the other side.”
The air was breathless. It seemed beyond belief to Pete that these men
would not hear the wild, drumlike beat of his heart. He shuffled his
feet uneasily. “Did you find most of the bodies?” he asked, when at last
he could trust himself to speak.
“About half of both crews. The Remittance Man, by the way, turned out to
be quite a fellow down South—as I had always guessed. His real name was
Newhall—something like that—and he’d got in a drunken brawl and killed
a man—was up here hiding. He was almost cut to pieces by the crags, and
they identified him by some papers found in his coat. Of course then
they searched his shack and got the whole story, piece at a time. The
poor devil’s lying buried over on the Bering Sea side, just about where
they found the body.”
Pete’s face was white, but he held himself with an iron grip. The truth
was plain enough now. He had given his coat, that night, to the big
Norseman—Big Chris Larson, the men had called him—and it was Larson’s
body that lay buried on the mainland opposite; it was Larson’s name
instead of his own that should be inscribed on the rude headstone. The
cruel crags had mutilated his body beyond recognition, but the papers in
his coat pocket had given the key.
He breathed deeply as he saw the full significance of this strange,
ironic prank of fate. He no longer need fear arrest, the arm of the law.
The word had gone out that Peter Newhall, murderer of Paul Sarichef, was
dead, and that his body lay buried on a far-off, lonely beach. No one
would look for him further. His photograph, posted in many police
stations, had been torn down long since. Fear of recognition there was
none: even his own wife, his own mother, were she alive, would never,
never recognize him in his present guise. He could go his own way now,
in safety. He could begin life anew.
He realized that even if he told these men before him that he was in
reality Peter Newhall, they would never believe him; they would think
him insane. Even if he wanted to prove his identity it would be no easy
task; he likely could not convince even his own wife except by reference
to certain priceless secrets that the two of them alone knew and
possibly by showing her one or two boyhood scars on his rugged hands.
Peter Newhall was of the dead. The court’s charge against him had been
abrogated by death. His crime against Sarichef was already beginning to
be forgotten; it had become part of the dead past. For the instant he
experienced a queer, creeping doubt of his own identity!
He could go to work here, unchallenged and unsuspected. It was as if he
had died and grown up again: that with his new appearance he must also
gain a new personality,—not that of the wealthy son of chivalry, Peter
Newhall, but that of simple Pete, a plodder and a son of toil, a man of
the North. He did not, however, deceive himself for an instant into
thinking that he could find happiness. Even though the man who had been
Peter Newhall was alive and well to-day, the love of living was as dead
as the kelp that floated on the deep. Instead of bringing Dorothy
nearer, this situation only raised an impassable barrier between
them—no less than the dark chasm of death itself. Except as an
outsider, gazing from without, he could never go back to his homeland.
His course would be simply to fill his days with labor and to speed the
night hours with sleep. He would play the game, clear to the end. It was
a strange destiny; but he had no other choice.