Chapter 13

Near the forward wheel a miniature binnacle housing a compass with phosphorescent card, advised him from time to time, as he consulted it, of the lay of their course. They were just then ploughing almost due northeast over a broad expanse, beckoned on by the distant flicker of a gas-buoy. But the information was less than worthless, and every reasonable guess he might have made as to their next move would have proved even more futile than merely idle; for when they had rounded the buoy, instead of standing, as any reasonable beings might have been expected to, on to Fisher's Island or at a tangent north toward the Connecticut littoral, they swung off something south of east--a course that could lead them nowhere but to the immensities of the sea itself.

Whitaker's breath caught in his throat as he examined this startling prospect. The Atlantic was something a trifle bigger than he had bargained for. To dare its temper, with a southwester brewing (by every weather sign he knew) in what was to all intents an open boat, since he would never be able to leave the cockpit for an instant's shelter in the cabin in any sort of a seaway--!

He shook a dubious, vastly troubled head. But he held on grimly in the face of dire forebodings.

Once out from under the lee of Gardiner's Island, a heavier run of waves beset them, catching the boats almost squarely on the beam: fortunately a sea of long, smooth, slow shouldering rollers, as yet not angry. Now and again, for all that, one would favour the _Trouble_ with a quartering slap that sent a shower of spray aboard her to drench Whitaker and swash noisily round the cockpit ere the self-bailing channels could carry it off. He was quickly wet to the skin and shivering. The hour was past midnight, and the strong air whipping in from the open sea had a bitter edge. His only consolation inhered in the reflection that he had companions in his misery: those who drove the leading boat could hardly escape what he must suffer; though he hoped and believed that the woman was shut below, warm and dry in the cabin.

Out over the dark waste to starboard a white light lifted, flashing. For a while a red eye showed beneath it, staring unwinkingly with a steadfast and sardonic glare, then disappeared completely, leaving only the blinking white. Far ahead another light, fixed white, hung steadily over the port counter, and so remained for over an hour.

Then most gradually the latter wore round upon the beam and dropped astern. Whitaker guessed at random, but none the less rightly, that they were weathering Block Island to the south with a leeway of several miles. Indisputably the Atlantic held them in the hollow of its tremendous hand. The slow, eternal deep-sea swell was most perceptible: a ceaseless impulse of infinite power running through the pettier, if more threatening, drive of waves kicked up by the wind. Fortunately the course, shifting to northeast by east, presently took them out of the swinging trough of the sea. The rollers now led them on, an endless herd, one after another falling sullenly behind as the two boats shot down into their shallow intervals and began to creep slowly up over the long gray backs of those that ran before.

It was after three in the morning, and, though Whitaker had no means of knowing it, they were on the last and longest leg of the cruise. They still had moonlight, but it was more wan and ghastly and threatened presently to fail them altogether, blotted out by the thickening weather. The wind was blowing with an insistent, unintermittent force it had not before developed. A haze, vaguely opalescent, encircled the horizon like a ghost of absinthe. The cold, formless, wavering dusk of dawn in time lent it a sickly hue of gray together with a seeming more substantial. Swathed in its smothering folds, the moon faded to the semblance of a plaque of dull silver, then vanished altogether. By four-thirty, when the twilight was moderately bright, Whitaker was barely able to distinguish the leading boat. The two seemed as if suspended, struggling like impaled insects, the one in the midst, the other near the edge, of a watery pit walled in by vapours.

He recognized in this phenomenon of the weather an exceptionally striking variation of what his sea-going experience had taught him to term a smoky sou'wester.

That hour found him on the verge of the admission that he was, as he would have said, about all in: the limit of endurance nearly approached. He was half-dazed with fatigue; his wet skin crawled with goose-flesh; his flesh itself was cold as stone. In the pit of his stomach lurked an indefinite, sickening sensation of chilled emptiness. His throat was sore and parched, his limbs stiff and aching, his face crusted with stinging particles of salt, his eyes red, sore and smarting. If his ankle troubled him, he was not aware of it; it would need sharp agony to penetrate the aura of dull, interminable misery that benumbed his consciousness.

With all this, he tormented himself with worry lest the tanks run dry. Though they had been filled only the day before, he had no clear notion of the horse-power of the motor or its hourly consumption of gasoline; and the drain upon the supply could not have been anything but extraordinary. If it were to run out before they made a landing or safe anchorage, he would find himself in ticklish straits; but this troubled him less than the fear that he might be obliged to give up the chase to which he had stuck so long and with a pertinacity which somewhat surprised even his own wonder.

And to give up now, when he had fought so far ... it was an intolerable thought. He protested against it with a vain, bitter violence void of any personal feeling or any pride of purpose and endurance. It was his solicitude for the woman alone that racked him. Whatever the enigmatic animus responsible for this outrage, it seemed most undeniable that none but men of the most desperate calibre would have undertaken it--men in whose sight no crime would be abominable, however hideous. To contemplate her fate, if abandoned to their mercies...!

The end came just before dawn, with a swiftness that stunned the faculties--as though one saw the naked wrath of God leap like lightning from the sky.

They were precisely as they had been, within a certain distance of one another, toiling on and ever on like strange misshapen spirits doomed to run an endless race. The harsh, shapeless light of imminent day alone manufactured a colour of difference: Whitaker now was able to see as two dark shapes the men in the body of the leading boat. The woman was not visible, but the doors to the cabin were closed, confirming his surmise that she at least had been sheltered through the night. One of the men was standing by the wheel, forward, staring ahead. The other occupied a seat in the cockpit, head and shoulders alone visible above the coaming. For the most part he seemed sunk in lethargy, head fallen forward, chin on chest; but now and then he looked up and back at the pursuing boat, his face a featureless patch of bleached pink.

Now suddenly the man at the wheel cried out something in a terrible voice of fright, so high and vehement that it even carried back against the booming gale for Whitaker to hear. Simultaneously he put the wheel over, with all his might. The other jumped from his seat, only to be thrown back as the little vessel swung broadside to the sea, heeling until she lay almost on her beam ends. The next instant she ceased, incredibly, to move--hung motionless in that resistless surge, an amazing, stupefying spectacle. It seemed minutes before Whitaker could force his wits to comprehend that she had struck and lay transfixed upon some submerged rock or reef.

A long, gray roller swept upon and over her, brimming her cockpit with foaming water. As it passed he saw the half-drowned men release the coamings, to which they had clung on involuntary impulse to escape being swept away, scramble upon the cabin roof, and with one accord abandon themselves to the will of the next wave to follow. As it broke over the boat and passed, he caught an instantaneous glimpse of their heads and arms bobbing and beating frantically as they whirled off through the yeasty welter.

But he saw this without pity or compassion. If he had been able to have his will with them, he would have sunk both ten fathoms deep without an instant's respite. His throat was choked with curses that welled up from a heart wrenched and raging at this discovery of cowardice unparalleled.

They had done what they could for themselves without even hesitating to release the woman imprisoned in the cabin.

XIV

DÉBÂCLE

The _Trouble_, meantime, was closing in upon the scene of tragedy with little less than locomotive speed. Yet, however suddenly disaster had overtaken the other vessel, Whitaker saw what he saw and had time to take measures to avoid collision, if what he did was accomplished wholly without conscious thought or premeditation. He had applied the reversing gear to the motor before he knew it. Then, while the engine choked, coughing angrily, and reversed with a heavy and resentful pounding in the cylinder-heads, he began to strip off his coat. He was within ten yards of the wreck when a wave overtook the _Trouble_ and sent a sheet of water sprawling over her stern to fill the cockpit ankle-deep. The next instant he swung the wheel over; the boat, moving forward despite the resistance of the propeller, drove heavily against the wreck, broadside to its stern. As this happened Whitaker leaped from one to the other, went to his knees in the cockpit of the wreck, and rose just in time to grasp the coaming and hold on against the onslaught of a hurtling comber.

It came down, an avalanche, crashing and bellowing, burying him deep in green. Thunderings benumbed him, and he began to strangle before it passed....

He found himself filling his lungs with free air and fighting his way toward the cabin doors through water waist-deep. Then he had won to them, had found and was tearing frantically at the solid brass bolt that held them shut. In another breath he had torn them open, wide, discovering the woman, her head and shoulders showing above the flood as she stood upon a transom, near the doorway, grasping a stanchion for support. Her eyes met his, black and blank with terror. He snatched through sheer instinct at a circular life-preserver that floated out toward him, and simultaneously managed to crook an arm round her neck.

Again the sea buried them beneath tons of raging dark water. Green lightnings flashed before his eyes, and in his ears there was a crashing like the crack of doom. His head was splitting, his heart on the point of breaking. The wave passed on, roaring. He could breathe. Now if ever....

As if stupefied beyond sensibility, the woman was passive to his handling. If she had struggled, if she had caught at and clung to him, or even if she had tried to help herself, he would in all likelihood have failed to cheat destruction. But she did none of these things, and he managed somehow to drag her from the cabin to the cockpit and to jam the life ring over her head and under one arm before the next wave bore down upon them.

As the wall of living green water drew near, he twisted one hand into the life-line of the cork ring and lifted the woman to the seat of the cockpit.

They were borne down, brutally buffeted, smothered and swept away. They came to the surface in the hollow of a deep, gray swale, fully fifty feet from the wreck. Whitaker retained his grasp of the life-preserver line. The woman floated easily in the support. He fancied a gleam of livelier consciousness in her staring eyes, and noticed with a curiously keen feeling of satisfaction that she was not only keeping her mouth closed, but had done so, apparently, while under water.

Relieved from danger of further submersion, at all events for the time being, he took occasion to rally his wits and look about him as well as he was able. It was easy, now, to understand how the kidnappers had come to their disaster; at this distance he could see plainly, despite the scudding haze, the profile of a high bluff of wave-channelled and bitten earth rising from a boulder-strewn beach, upon which the surf broke with a roar deafening and affrighting. Even a hardy swimmer might be pardoned for looking askance at such a landing. And Whitaker had a woman to think of and care for. Difficult to imagine how he was to drag her, and himself, through that vicious, pounding surf, without being beaten to jelly against the boulders....

As the next billow swung them high on its racing crest, he, gaining a broader field of vision, caught an instantaneous impression of a stark shoulder of the land bulking out through the mists several hundred yards to the left; suggesting that the shore curved inward at that spot. The thought came to him that if he could but weather that point, he might possibly find on the other side a better landing-place, out of the more forcible, direct drive of surf. It would be next to an impossibility to make it by swimming, with but one arm free, and further handicapped by the dead weight of the woman. And yet that way lay his only hope.

In that same survey he saw the _Trouble_, riding so low, with only bow and coamings awash, that he knew she must be waterlogged, rolling beam-on in to the beach. Of the two men from the other boat he saw nothing whatever. And when again he had a similar chance to look, the hapless power-boat was being battered to pieces between the boulders. Even such would be their fate unless....

He put forth every ounce of strength and summoned to his aid all his water wisdom and skill. But he fought against terrible odds, and there was no hope in him as he fought.

Then suddenly, to his utter amazement, the lift of a wave discovered to him a different contour of the shore; not that the shore had changed, but his position with regard to it had shifted materially and in precisely the way that he had wished for and struggled to bring about. Instead of being carried in to the rock-strewn beach, they were in the grip of a backwash which was bearing them not only out of immediate danger, but at the same time alongshore toward the point under whose lee he hoped to find less turbulent conditions.

It was quite half the battle--more than half; he had now merely to see that the set of this backward flow did not drag them too far from shore. Renewed faith in his star, a sense of possible salvation, lent strength to his flagging efforts. Slowly, methodically, he worked with his charge toward the landward limits of the current, cunningly biding the time to abandon it. And very soon that time came; they were abreast the point; he could see something of a broad, shelving beach, backed by lesser bluffs, to leeward of it. He worked free of the set with a mighty expenditure of force, nervous and physical, and then for a time, rested, limiting his exertion strictly to the degree requisite to keep him afloat, while the waves rocked him landwards with the woman. He found leisure even to give her a glance to see whether she still lived, was conscious or comatose.

He found her not only fully aware of her position, but actually swimming a little--striking out with more freedom than might have been expected, considering how her arms and shoulders were hampered by the life-ring. A suspicion crossed his mind that most probably she had been doing as much for a considerable time, that to her as much as to himself their escape from the offshore drift had been due. Certainly he could not doubt that her energies had been subjected to a drain no less severe than he had suffered. Her face was bloodless to the lips, pale with the pallor of snow; deep bluish shadows ringed eyes that had darkened strangely, so that they seemed black rather than violet; her features were so drawn and pinched that he almost wondered how he could have thought her beautiful beyond all living women. And her wondrous hair, broken from its fastenings, undulated about her like a tangled web of sodden sunbeams.

Three times he essayed to speak before he could wring articulate sounds from his cracked lips and burning throat.

"You ... all right?"

She replied with as much difficulty:

"Yes ... you may ... let go...."

To relax the swollen fingers that grasped the life-line was pure torture.

He attempted no further communication. None, indeed, was needed. It was plain that she understood their situation.

Some minutes passed before he became aware that they were closing in quickly to the shelving beach--so swiftly, indeed, that there was reason to believe the onward urge of the waves measurably reënforced by a shoreward set of current. But if they had managed to escape the greater fury on the weather side of the point, they had still a strong and angry surf to reckon with. Only a little way ahead, breakers were flaunting their white manes, while the thunder of their breaking was as the thundering of ten thousand hoofs.

Whitaker looked fearfully again at the woman. But she was unquestionably competent to care for herself. Proof of this he had in the fact that she had contrived to slip the life-preserver up over her head and discard it altogether. Thus disencumbered, she had more freedom for the impending struggle.

He glanced over his shoulder. They were on the line of breakers. Behind them a heavy comber was surging in, crested with snow, its concave belly resembling a vast sheet of emerald. In another moment it would be upon them. It was the moment a seasoned swimmer would seize.

His eye sought the girl's. In hers he read understanding and assent. Of one mind, they struck out with all their strength. The comber overtook them, clasped them to its bosom, tossed them high upon its great glassy shoulder. They fought madly to retain that place, and to such purpose that they rode it over a dozen yards before it crashed upon the beach, annihilating itself in a furious welter of creaming waters. Whitaker felt land beneath his feet....

The rest was like the crisis of a nightmare drawn out to the limit of human endurance. Conscious thought ceased: terror and panic and the blind instinct of self-preservation--these alone remained. The undertow tore at Whitaker's legs as with a hundred murderous hands. He fought his way forward a few paces--or yard or two--only to be overwhelmed, ground down into the gravel. He rose through some superhuman effort and lunged on, like a blind, hunted thing.... He came out of it eventually to find himself well up on the beach, out of the reach of the waves. But the very earth seemed to billow about him, and he could hardly keep his feet. A numbing faintness with a painful retching at once assailed him. He was but vaguely aware of the woman reeling not far from him, but saved....

Later he found that something of the worst effects had worn away. His scattered wits were reëstablishing intercommunication. The earth was once more passably firm beneath him. He was leaning against the careened hulk of a dismantled cat-boat with a gaping rent in its side. At a little distance the woman was sitting in the sands, bosom and shoulders heaving convulsively, damp, matted hair veiling her like a curtain of sunlit seaweed.

He moved with painful effort toward her. She turned up to him her pitiful, writhen face, white as parchment.

"Are you--hurt?" he managed to ask. "I mean--injured?"

She moved her head from side to side, as if she could not speak for panting.

"I'm--glad," he said dully. "You stay--here.... I'll go get help."

He raised his eyes, peering inland.

Back of the beach the land rose in long, sweeping hillocks, treeless but green. His curiously befogged vision made out a number of shapes that resembled dwellings.

"Go ... get ... help ..." he repeated thickly.

He started off with a brave, staggering rush that carried him a dozen feet inland. Then his knees turned to water, and the blackness of night shut down upon his senses.

XV

DISCLOSURES

Sleep is a potent medicine for the mind; but sometimes the potion is compounded with somewhat too heavy a proportion of dreams and nonsense; when it's apt to play curious tricks with returning consciousness. When Whitaker awoke he was on the sands of Narragansett, and the afternoon was cloudy-warm and bright, so that his eyes were grateful for the shade of a white parasol that a girl he knew was holding over him; and his age was eighteen and his cares they were none; and the girl was saying in a lazy, laughing voice: "I love my love with a P because he's Perfectly Pulchritudinous and Possesses the Power of Pleasing, and because he Prattles Prettily and his socks are Peculiarly Purple--"

"And," the man who'd regained his youth put in, "his name is Peter and he's Positively a Pest...."

But the voice in which he said this was quite out of the picture--less a voice than a croak out of a throat kiln-dry and burning. So he grew suspicious of his senses; and when the parasol was transformed into the shape of a woman wearing a clumsy jacket of soiled covert-cloth over a non-descript garment of weirdly printed calico--then he was sure that something was wrong with him.

Besides, the woman who wasn't a parasol suddenly turned and bent over him an anxious face, exclaiming in accents of consternation: "O dear! If he's delirious--!"

His voice, when he strove to answer, rustled and rattled rather than enunciated, surprising him so that he barely managed to say: "What nonsense! I'm just thirsty!" Then the circuit of returning consciousness closed and his lost youth slipped forever from his grasp.

"I thought you would be," said the woman, calmly; "so I brought water. Here...."

She offered a tin vessel to his lips, as he lay supine, spilling a quantity of its contents on his face and neck and a very little into his mouth, if enough to make him choke and splutter. He sat up suddenly, seized the vessel--a two-quart milk-pail--and buried his face in it, gradually tilting it, while its cool, delicious sweetness irrigated his arid tissues, until every blessed drop was drained. Then, and not till then, he lowered the pail and with sane vision began to renew acquaintance with the world.

He was sitting a trifle out of the shallow imprint of his body in the sands, in the lee of the beached cat-boat he now recalled as one might the features of an incubus. The woman he had rescued sat quite near him. The gale was still booming overhead, but now with less force (or so he fancied); and the surf still crashed in thunders on the beach a hundred feet or more away; but the haze was lighter, and the blue of the sky was visible, if tarnished.

Looking straight ahead from where he sat, the sands curved off in a wide crescent, ending in a long, sandy spit. Beyond this lay a broad expanse of maddened water, blue and white, backed by the empurpled loom of a lofty headland, dim in the smoky distance.