X
Onthe exposed deck the storm met the two adventurers with a yell. For the first time Bess knew its full fury, as the wind buffeted her, and the sleet swept like fine shot into her face. They clung to the railing, then fought their way to the hold.
Hidden by the darkness and the sleet, no one saw them carry up the heavy liquor cases and drop them into the sea. The noise of the storm concealed the little sound they made. Finally only two bottles remained, the last of a broken case.
“You take one of those and ditch it in your room,” McNab advised. “I’ll keep the other. There might come a time when we’ll find real need for ’em—as a stimulant for some one who is freezing.”
“Take care of both of them,” Bess urged. “I’m not sure I could keep mine, if any one asked for it.”
“I don’t know about that. I believe I’d bet on you. And now it’s done—forget about it.”
Soon they crept back along the deck, McNab to his work, Bess to her stateroom. The latter ignited the lantern that served to light her room, and for a moment stood staring into the little mirror that hung above her washstand. She hadn’t escaped the fear of the night and the storm and of the bold deed she had just done. Her deep, blue eyes were wide, her face was pale, the childlike appeal Ned had noticed long ago was more pronounced than ever. Presently she sat down to await developments.
They were not long in coming. She and McNab had all but encountered Ned on his way to the hold. His bottles were empty, and the desire for strong drink had not left him yet. In the darkness under the deck he groped blindly for his cases.
They seemed to evade him. Breathing hard, he sought a match, scratching it against the wall. Then he stared in dumb and incredulous astonishment.
His stock of liquor was gone. Not even the cases were left. Thinking that perhaps some shift in the position of the stores had concealed them, he made a moment’s frantic search through the hold. Then, raging like a child, and in imminent danger of slipping on the perilous deck, he rushed to the pilot house.
“Captain, do you know what became of my liquors?” he demanded. “I can’t find them in the hold.”
The binnacle light revealed the frenzy and desperation on his drawn face; the mouth was no longer smiling its crooked, boyish smile. Knutsen glanced at him once, then turned his eyes once more over his wheel. For the moment he did not seem to be aware of Ned’s presence. He made, however, one significant motion: his brown hand reached out to the bottle beside him, in which perhaps two good drinks remained, and softly set it among the shadows at his feet.
“I say!” Ned urged. “I tell you my liquor’s gone!”
The captain seemed to be studying the yellow path that his searchlight cut in the darkness. The waves were white-capped and raging; the sleet swept out of the gloom, gleamed a moment in the yellow radiance, then sped on into the night.
“I heard you,” Knutsen answered slowly. “I was thinking about it. I haven’t any idea who took it—if he’s still got it, I’ll see that he gives it back. It was a dirty trick——”
“You don’t know, then, anything about it?” As he waited, Ned got the unmistakable idea that the captain neither knew nor really cared. He was more interested in retaining the two remaining drinks in his own bottle than in helping Ned regain his lost cases. These two were enough for him. It was wholly in keeping with that strange psychology of drunkards that he should have no further cares.
“Of course I don’t know anything about ’em—but I’ll help you investigate in the morning,” he answered. “I’m very sorry, Mr. Cornet—that it should happen aboard my ship——”
“To hell with your ship! I’m going to investigate to-night.”
Ned started out, but he halted in the doorway, arrested by a sudden suspicion. Presently he whirled and made his way to Bess’s stateroom.
He knocked sharply on the door. Bess opened it wide. Then for a long second he stared into her deep-blue, appealing eyes.
“I suppose you did it?” he demanded.
She nodded. “I did it—to save you—from yourself. Not to mention perhaps saving the ship as well.”
His lip drew up in scorn. Angry almost to the verge of childish tears, he could not at first trust himself to speak. “You’ve certainly taken things into your own hands,” he told her bitterly. His wrath gathered, breaking from him at last in a flood. “You ill-bred prude, I wish I could never lay eyes on you again!”
His scornful eyes saw the pain well into her face. Evidently he had gone the limit: he couldn’t have hurt her worse with a blow of his hand. Touched a little in spite of himself, he began to feel the first prick of remorse. Perhaps it had done no good to speak so cruelly. Certainly the whiskies could not be regained. Probably the fool thought she was acting for his own good. He turned, slammed the door, and strode back to the dining saloon.
It was by far the most bitter moment in Bess’s life. She had done right, but her payment was a curse from the man she had hoped to serve. All her castles had fallen: her dreams had broken like the bubbles they were. This was the answer to the calling in her heart and the longing in her soul,—the spoken wish that she might pass from his sight forever.
For the last few days, since they had entered this strange, snowy, twilight region, she had had dreams such as she had never dared admit into her heart before. Anything could happen up here. No wonder was too great. It was the kind of place where men found themselves, where all things were in proper balance, and false standards fell away. Some way, she had been on the lookout for a miracle. But the things which had been proven false, which could not live in this bitter world of realities, were her own dreams! They had been the only things that had died. She had been a fool to hope that here, at the wintry edge of the world, she might find the happiness she had missed in her native city. The world was with her yet, crushing her hopes as its rocky crust crushes the fallen nestling before it learns to fly!
But at his post McNab had already forgotten the episode of the liquor cases. Indeed, he had forgotten many other matters of much greater moment. At the present his mind was wholly occupied by two stern realities,—one of them being that the storm still raged in unabated fury, and the other that a drunken captain was driving his craft at a breakneck speed over practically uncharted waters.
The danger lay not only in the fact that Knutsen had disregarded McNab’s good advice to seek shelter in one of the island harbors. Even now he was disregarding the way of comparative safety, was not pausing to take soundings, but was racing along before the wind instead of heading into it with the power of the auxiliary engines. With wind and wave hurling her forward, there would be no chance to turn back or avoid any island reef that might suddenly loom in their path. Knutsen was trusting to his sea gods over waters he had never sailed before, torn by storms and lighted only by a feeble searchlight.
Once more McNab lifted his head through the hatch into the pilot house; and for long seconds he studied intently the flushed face over the wheel. They hadn’t really helped matters, so far as Knutsen was concerned, by throwing the cases overboard. Seemingly his watch would be over before the fumes of the liquor he had already consumed died in his brain. At present he was in its full flush: wholly reckless, obstinate, uncertain of temper. Was there any possible good in appealing to him further?
“What now?” Knutsen asked gruffly.
“You’ve forgotten all the seamanship you ever knew,” McNab returned angrily. “There’s no hurry about reaching Tzar Island. And you’re risking every body’s life on board, sailing the way you are.”
“Are you captain of dis boat?” Knutsen demanded angrily.
“No, but——”
“Den get out of here. I know exactly what I’m doing. You’re just as safe as——”
But it came about that Captain Knutsen did not finish the sentence. McNab was never to find out, from Knutsen’s lips, just how safe he was. All at once he cried sharply in warning.
Before ever Knutsen heard that sharp cry, he knew what lay ahead. Dulled though his vision was, slow the processes of his brain, he saw that curious ridge of white foam in front,—an inoffensive-looking trail of white across their bows. At the same instant his keen ears caught a new sound, one that was only half-revealed in the roar and beat of the storm.
There was not the pause of an instant before his great, muscular arms made response. At the same instant Forest tried to apply the power of his engines in obedience to the sharp gong from above. And then both Knutsen and McNab braced themselves for the shock they knew would come.
The craft seemed to leap in the water, shuddered like a living thing, and the swath of the searchlight described a long arc into the sleet and the storm. It may have been that Knutsen shouted again—a meaningless sound that was lost quickly in the wind—but for seconds that seemed to drag into interminable centuries he sat absolutely without outward sign of motion. His great hands clutched his wheel, the muscles were set and bunched, but it was as if the man had died and was frozen rigid in an instant of incredible tension. His face utterly without expression, Forest crouched beside his engines.
There was nothing that either of them could do. The waves and wind were a power no man could stay. All their efforts were as useless as Knutsen’s shout; already the little ship was in the remorseless grasp of a great billow that was hurling her toward the ridge of white foam in front. For another instant she seemed to hang suspended, as if suddenly taken wing, and then there was a sheer drop, a sense of falling out of the world. A queer ripping, tearing sound, not loud at all, not half so terrifying as the bluster of the wind, reached them from the hold.
Cold sober, Knutsen turned in his place and gonged down certain orders to Forest. In scarcely a moment, it seemed, they were pulling the battens from the two little lifeboats on the deck.
XI
Knutsen’sbrain was entirely clear and sure as he gave his orders on the deck. His hand was steady as iron. His failure to master himself had brought disaster, but he knew how to master a ship at a time like this. From the instant theCharonhad struck the reef, he was the power upon that storm-swept deck, and whatever hope McNab had lay in him.
In the lantern light, blasted by the wind and in the midst of the surging waves, the scene had little semblance to reality. It was a mad dream from first to last, never to be clearly remembered by the survivors: a queer, confused jumble of vivid images that could never be straightened out. The head-light still threw its glare into the sleet-filled night. The biting, chill wind swept over the deck and into the darkness. The ship settled down like a leaden weight.
Almost at once the four passengers were on deck, waiting to take their meager chance in the lifeboats. The stress, the raging elements, those angry seas that ever leaped higher and nearer, as if coveting their mortal lives, most of all the terror such as had never previously touched them, affected no two of them alike. Of the three women, Bess alone moved forward, out of the shelter of the cabin, to be of what aid she could. Her drawn, white face was oddly childlike in the lantern light. Mrs. Hardenworth had been stricken and silenced by the nearing visage of death; Lenore, almost unconscious with terror, made strangling, sobbing sounds that the wind carried away. And in this moment of infinite travail Ned Cornet felt his manhood stirring within him.
Perhaps it was merely instinct. It is true that men of the most abandoned kind often show startling courage and nobility in a crisis. The reason is simply that the innate virtue of the race, a light and a glory that were implanted in the soul when the body was made in the image of its Maker, comes to the surface and supersedes the base impulses of degeneracy. There is no uneven distribution of that virtue: it is as much a part of man as his hands or his skull; and the difference between one man and another lies only in the degree in which it is developed and made manifest and put in control over the daily life. Perhaps the strength that rose in Ned was merely the assertion of an inner manhood, wholly stripped of the traits that made him the individual he was,—nothing that would endure, nothing that portended a change and growth of character. But at least the best and strongest side of him was in the ascendency to-night. The danger left him cool rather than cost him his self-control. The seeming imminence of death steadied him and nerved him.
Bess saw him under the lantern light, and he was not the man who had cursed her at the door of her room. For the moment all things were forgotten except this. Likely the thing he had spoken would come true, now. Perhaps he would get his wish. For one interminable instant in which her heart halted in her breast—as in death—sea and wind and storm ceased to matter.
Ned came up, and Knutsen’s cold gaze leaped over his face. “Help me here,” he commanded. “McNab, you help Forest and Julius launch the larger boat.”
There was not much launching to do. Waves were already bursting over the deck. Knutsen turned once more.
“We want four people in each boat,” he directed sharply. “Cornet, you and I and Miss Hardenworth in this one. The other girl will have to get in here too. The other boat’s slightly larger—Mrs. Hardenworth, get in with McNab, Forest, and Julius.”
Bess shook herself with difficulty from her revery. This was no time for personal issues, to hearken to the voices of her inmost heart when the captain was shouting through the storm. The only issues remaining now were those of deliverance or disaster, life or death. Even now the white hands of the waves were stretching toward her. Yet this terrible reality did not hold her as it should. Instead, her thoughts still centered upon Ned: the danger was always Ned’s instead of her own; it was Ned’s life that was suspended by a thread above the abyss. It was hard to remember herself: the instinct of self-preservation was not even now in the ascendency.
There is a blasting and primitive terror in any great convulsion of the elements. These are man’s one reality, the eternal constant in which he plights his faith in a world of bewildering change: the air of heaven, the sky of stars, the unutterable expanse of sea. His spirit can not endure to see them in tumult, broken forth from the restraint of law. Such sights recall from the germ-plasm those first almighty terrors that were the title page of conscious life; and they disrupt quickly the mastery that mind, in a thousand-thousand years, has gained over instinct. Yet for herself Bess was carried out from and beyond the terror of the storm. She had almost forgotten it: it seemed already part of the natural system in which she moved. She was scarcely aware that the captain had shouted to make himself heard; that she must needs shout to answer him: it was as if this were her natural tone of voice, and she was no more conscious of raising it above the bellow of the storm than are certain fisherfolk, habitants of wave-swept coasts, when they call one to another while working about their nets.
The reason was simply that she was thinking too hard about Ned to remember her own danger, and thus terror could not reach her. It can never curse and blast those who have renounced self for others; and thus, perhaps, she had blundered into that great secret of happiness that wise men have tried to teach since the world was new. Perhaps, in the midst of stress and travail, she had glimpsed for an instant the very soul of life, the star that is the hope and dream of mankind.
But while she had forgotten her own danger, she was all too aware of the promptings of her own heart. The issue went farther than Ned’s life. It penetrated, in secret ways, the most intimate depths of her relations with him. It was natural at such a time that she should remember Ned’s danger to the exclusion of her own. The strangeness of that moment lay in the fact that she also remembered his wishes and his words. She could not forget their last scene together.
“Put Mrs. Hardenworth in your boat, so she and Lenore can be together,” she told Captain Knutsen. “I’ll get in the other.”
The captain did not seem to hear. He continued to shout his orders. In the work of lowering the lifeboat he had cause to lift his lantern high, and for a moment its yellow gleam was bright upon Bess’s drawn, haggard face. Farther off it revealed Ned, white-faced but erect in the beat of the storm.
In one instant’s insight, a single glimpse between the storm and the sea, he understood that she was taking him at his word. For some reason beyond his ken—likely beyond hers, too—she had asked to be put in McNab’s boat so that his wish he had spoken in anger at the door of her stateroom might come true. How silly, how trivial he had been! Those angry words had not come from his heart: only from some false, superficial side of him that was dying in the storm. He had never dreamed that she would take them seriously. They were the mere spume of a child that had not yet learned to be a man.
“Get in with us,” he said shortly. “Don’t be silly—as I was.” Then, lest she should mistake his sentiment: “Mrs. Hardenworth is twice your weight, and this boat will be overloaded as it is.”
The girl looked at him quietly, nodding her head. If he had expected gratitude he was disappointed, for she received the invitation as merely an actuality of her own, immutable destiny. Indeed the wings of destiny were sweeping her forward, her life still intertwined with his, both pawns in the vast, inscrutable movement of events.
He helped her into the dory. Julius, who at the captain’s orders had been rifling the cabins, threw blankets to her. Then tenderly, lending her his strength, Ned helped Lenore over the wind-swept deck into the bow seat of the lifeboat, nearest to the seat he would take himself. “Buck up, my girl,” he told her, a deep, throbbing note in his voice. “I’ll look after you.”
Already the deck was deserted. The dim light showed that the larger dory, containing McNab, Forest, Julius, and Mrs. Hardenworth, had already been launched. There was no sign of them now. The darkness and the storm had already dropped between. They could not hear a shout of directions between the three men, not a scream of fear from the terrified woman who was their charge.
It was as if they had never been. Only theCharonwas left—her decks awash and soon to dive and vanish beneath the waves—and their little group in the dim gleam of the lantern. Knutsen and Ned took their places at the oarlocks, Ned nearer the bow, Knutsen just behind. A great wave seemed to catch them and hurl them away.
Could they live in this little boat on these tumultuous seas? Of course the storm was nothing compared to the tempests weathered successfully by larger lifeboats, but it held the utmost peril here. Any moment might see them overwhelmed. The least of those great waves, catching them just right, might overturn them in an instant.
Already theCharonwas lost in the darkness, just as the other lifeboat had been lost an instant before. Not even Knutsen could tell in what direction she lay. Still the waves hurried them along. The chill wind shrieked over them, raging that they should have dared to venture into its desolate domains.
Could they live until the morning? Wouldn’t cold and exposure make an end to them in the long, bitter hours to come? The odds looked so uneven, the chances so bitterly long against them. Could their little sparks of being, the breath of life that ever was so wan and feeble, the little, wondering moment of self-knowledge that at best seemed only the fabric of a dream—could these prevail against the vast, unspeakable forces of the North? Wouldn’t the spark go out in a little while, the breath be blown away on the wings of the wind, the self-light burn down in the gloom? At any moment their fragile boat might strike another submerged reef. There was no light to guide them now. They were lost and alone in an empty ocean, helpless prey to the whims of the North.
The pillars of their strength had fallen. Man’s civilization that had been their god was suddenly shown as an empty idol, helpless to aid them now. The light, the beauty, the strong cities they had loved had no influence here: seemingly death itself could not make these things farther distant, less availing. For the first time since they were born Ned and Lenore were face to face withlife, and also with the death that shadows life. For the first time they knew the abject terror of utter helplessness. There was nothing they could do. They were impotent prey to whatever fate awaited them. Captain Knutsen, mighty of frame, his blood surging fiercely through the avenues of his veins, and Bess, schooled to hardship, were ever so much better off than they. They were better disciplined, stronger in misfortune, better qualified to meet danger and disaster. For no other reason than that—holding respect for these northern seas—they were more warmly dressed, their chances were better for ultimate survival.
But what awaited them when the night was done? How slight was the chance that, in this world of gray waters, they would ever encounter an inhabited island. It was true that islands surrounded them on all sides, but mostly they were but wastes of wind-swept tundra, not one in four having human habitations. Mostly the islands were large, and such habitations as there might be were scattered in sheltered valleys along the shore, and it was wholly probable that the little boat could pass and miss them entirely. They couldn’t survive many days on these wintry waters. The meager supplies of food and the jugs of water in the lifeboats would soon be exhausted, and who could come to their aid? Which one of Ned’s friends, wishing him such a joyous farewell at the docks, would ever pause in his play one moment to investigate his fate?
A joy-ride! There was a savage irony in the thought of the holiday spirit with which he had undertaken the expedition. And the voices he had heard out of the sea had evidently told him true when they had foretold his own death. For all his natural optimism, the odds against him seemed too great ever to overcome. And there was but one redeeming thought,—a thought so dimly discerned in the secret mind of the man that it never fully reached his conscious self; so bizarre and strange that he could only attribute it to incipient delirium. It was simply that he had already fortified himself, in some degree, to meet the training camp thereafter!
The journey through the gray, mysterious seas, the nearing heart of nature, most of all to-night’s disaster had, in some small measure, given him added strength. It was true that his old conceit was dying in his body. His old sense of mastery over himself and over life was shown as a bitter delusion: rather he was revealed as the helpless prey of forces beyond even his power to name. This self-centered man, who once had looked on life from the seats of the scornful, felt suddenly incompetent even to know the forces that had broken him down. Yet in spite of all this loss, there was something gained. Instead of false conceit he began to sense the beginnings of real self-mastery. For all his terror, freezing his heart in his breast, he suddenly saw clear; and he knew he had taken an upward step toward Life and Light.
There would not be quite so long a course of training for him, in the Hereafter. He could go through and on more quickly on account of these past days. Therewasa way through and out—his father had told him that—and it wasn’t so far distant as when he had first left home. With death so close that he could see into its cavernous eyes, such was Ned’s one consolation as the craft drifted before the wind.
The terror that was upon him lifted, just an instant, as he bent to hear what Lenore was trying to tell him. Lenore was his love and his life, the girl to whom he had plighted his troth, and his first obligation was to her. He must see to her first.
“I’m cold,” she was sobbing. “I’m freezing to death. Oh, Ned, I’m freezing to death.”
Of course it wasn’t true. Chill though the night was, the temperature was still above freezing, and the blankets about her largely protected her from the biting winds. She was chilled through, however, as were the other three occupants of the craft; and the fear and the darkness were themselves like ice in her veins. Ned’s hands were stiff, but he managed to remove one of his own blankets and wrap it about the shoulders of the girl. The boat lurched forward, sped by the waves and the wind.
The night hours passed over the face of the sea. The wind raged through the sky, biting and bitter for all their warm wraps. It was abating, now, the waves were less high; but if anything its breath was more chill as the hour drew toward dawn. The wind-blown sleet swept into their faces.
Both girls sought refuge in troubled sleep. Ned sat with his arms about Lenore, giving her what warmth he could from his own body. Bess was huddled in her seat. Could their less rugged constitutions stand many hours of such cold and exposure? It was a losing game, already. The North was too much for them. Life is a fragile thing at best: a few hours more might easily spell the end.
But that hour saw the return of an ancient mystery, carrying back the soul to those gray days when the earth was without form, and void. Darkness had been upon the face of the waters, but once more it was divided from the day.
Even here, seemingly at the edge of the world, the ancient miracle did not fail. A grayness, like a mist, spread slowly; and the curtains of darkness slowly receded. The storm was abating swiftly now; and the dawn broke over an easily rolling sea.
Captain Knutsen, who had sat so long in one position—his gaze fastened on one point of the horizon—that he gave the impression of being unconscious, suddenly started and pointed his hand. His voice, pitched to the noise of the storm, roared out into the quiet dawn.
“Land!” he shouted. “We’re coming to land!”
XII
Noneof the other three in the lifeboat could make out the little, gray line on the horizon that Captain Knutsen identified as land. Ned, who had been wide awake, prayed that he was not mistaken, yet could not find it in his heart to believe him. Bess and Lenore both started out of their sleep, and the former turned her head wearily, a wan smile about her drawn lips.
“Row, man, row!” Knutsen called happily to Ned. “The only way we can save that girl from collapse is to get her to a fire.” His own oars dipped, and his powerful back bent to the task.
So the issue had got down to that! Ned knew perfectly well that Lenore was the girl meant; in spite of the added blanket, she had fared worse than Bess. Perhaps she had less vitality: perhaps she had not met the night’s adversity with the same spirit. Ned was not an expert oarsman, but it was ever to his credit that he gave all his strength to the oars. And he found to his joy that the night’s adventure had left it largely unimpaired.
With the waves and the wind behind them, Knutsen saw the gray line that was the island slowly strengthen. The time came at last, when his weaker arms were shot through with burning pain, that Ned could also make it out. It was still weary miles away. And there was still the dreadful probability—three chances out of four—that it was uninhabited by human beings.
And death would find them quickly enough if they failed to find human habitations. For all Knutsen’s prowess, for all that he was so obviously a man of his hands, Ned couldn’t see any possibility of sustaining life on one of the barren, wind-swept deserts for more than a few days at most. They had no guns to procure meat from the wild: their little stores of food would not last long. The cold itself, though not now severe, would likely master them quickly. Even if they could find fuel, they had no axe to cut it up for a fire. In all probability, they couldn’t even build a fire in the snow and the sleet.
The stabbing pain in his arms was ever harder to bear. He was paying the price for his long pampering of his muscles. The time soon came when he had to change his stroke, dipping the oars at a cheating angle. Even if it were a matter of life and death to Lenore he couldn’t hold up. He couldn’t stand the pace. Knutsen, however, still rowed untiringly.
Soon the island began to take shape, revealing itself as of medium size in comparison with many of the islands of Bering Sea, yet seemingly large enough to support a kingdom. The gray line they had seen first revealed itself as a low range of mountains, bare and wind-swept, extending the full length of the island. What timber there was—meager growths of Sitka spruce and quivering aspen—appeared only on some of the south slopes of the hills and in scattered patches on the valley floor.
In the gray light of dawn the whole expanse was one of unutterable desolation. Even the rapture that they had felt at deliverance from the sea was some way stifled and dulled in the brooding despair that seemed to be its very spirit. They had passed many bleak, windy islands on the journey; but none but what were gardens compared to this. Ned tried to rouse himself from a strange apathy, a sudden, infinite hopelessness that fell like a shadow over him.
Likely enough it was just a mood with him, nothing innate in the island itself. Probably his own fatigue was playing tricks on his imagination. Yet the solid earth seemed no longer familiar. It was as if he had passed beyond his familiar world, known to his five senses and firm beneath his feet, and had come to an eerie, twilight land beyond the horizon. It was so still, lying so bleak and gray in the midst of these endless waters, seemingly so eternally isolated from all he had known and seen. The physical characteristics of the island enhanced, if anything, its mysterious atmosphere. The mossy barrens that comprised most of the island floor, the little, scattered clumps of timber, the deep valleys through which the shining streams ran to the sea, the rugged, shapeless hills beyond, each real in itself, combined to convey an image of unreality. Over it all lay the snow. The whole land was swept with it.
It was evidently the kingdom of the wild. It was the home of caribou and bear, fox and wolverine rather than men. And the dreadful probability was ever more manifest that the island contained not a single hearth, a single Indian igloo in which they might find shelter.
The place seemed to be utterly uninhabited by human beings. The white shore was nearing now, the craft had reached the mouth of a large harbor formed by the emptying waters of a small river; and as yet the voyagers could not make out a single roof, a single canoe on the shore. Knutsen peered with straining eyes.
“It looks bad,” he said tonelessly. “If there was a village here it ought to be located at the mouth of that river. It’s the logical place for a camp. They always stay near the salmon.”
Straining, Ned suddenly saw what seemed to him a manifestation of human inhabitants. There were clearly pronounced tracks, showing dark against the otherwise unbroken snow, leading from the sea to a patch of heavy forest a quarter of a mile back on the island. He pointed to them, his eye kindling with renewed hope.
But Knutsen shook his head. “I can’t tell from here. They might be animal tracks.”
The canoe pushed farther into the harbor. The roll of the waves was ever less, and the boat rode evenly on almost quiet water. They would know soon now. They would either find safety, or else their last, little hope would go the way of all the others. Surely they could not live a day unaided in this bleak, desolate land.
But at that instant Bess, who had sat so quiet that her companions had thought her asleep, uttered a low cry. For all its subdued tone, its living note of hope and amazement caused both men to turn to her. Her white face was lifted, her blue eyes shining, and she was pointing to the fringe of timber at the end of the trail in the snow.
“What is it?” she asked in a low tone. “Isn’t it a man?”
Her keen eyes had beheld what Knutsen’s had missed—a dark form half in shadow against the edge of the scrub timber. For all that it was less than a quarter of a mile distant, both men had to strain to make it out. The explanation lay partly in the depths of the surrounding shadows; partly in the fact that the form was absolutely without motion. It is an undeniable fact that only moving figures are quickly discernible in the light and shadow of the wild places: thus the forest creatures find their refuge from their enemies simply by standing still and so remaining unobserved. The thing at the timber edge had evidently learned this lesson. In its dimness and obscurity it suggested some furtive creature native to the woods.
Yet, for all its lack of motion, this was unmistakably a living being. It was not just an odd-shaped stump, a dark shadow under tree limbs such as so often misleads a big-game hunter. The brain seemed to know it, without further verification by the senses. Bess had said it was the form of a man, and the more intent their gaze, the more probable it seemed that she was right. The fear that had oppressed Knutsen that it might be merely the form of some one of the larger forest creatures—perhaps a bear, standing erect, or a caribou facing them—was evidently groundless. It was a man, and he was plainly standing motionless, fully aware of and watching their approach.
Yet the atmosphere of vagueness prevailed. He was so like a woods creature in the instinctive way he had taken advantage of the concealment of the shadows. It was a wonder that Bess had ever observed him. And now, drawing closer, his proportions seemed to be considerably larger than is customary in the human species. Now that his outline grew plain, he loomed like a giant. There is nothing so deceptive, however, as the size of an object seen at a distance in the wilderness. The degree of light, the clearness of the atmosphere, the nature of the background and surroundings all have their effect: often a snow-hare looks as big as a fox or a porcupine as large as a bear. Ned, sharing none of Knutsen’s inner sense of unrest, yielding at last to the rapture of impending deliverance, raised his arms and shouted across the waters.
“I want to be sure he sees us,” he explained quickly.
Knutsen strove to rid himself of the unwonted dismay that took hold of him. A deep-buried subconsciousness had suddenly manifested itself within him, but the messages it conveyed were proven ridiculous by his own good sense. It was the first time, however, that this inner voice had ever led him astray. Surely this was deliverance, life instead of what had seemed certain death, yet he was oppressed and baffled as he had never been in his life before.
It was soon made plain that the man had caught Ned’s signal. He lifted his arm, then came walking down toward the water’s edge. Then Knutsen, who until now had rowed steadily, paused with his paddles poised in the air.
“It’s not an Indian,” he breathed quickly. Ned turned to look at him in amazement, yet not knowing at what he was amazed. “It’s a white man!”
“Isn’t that all the better?” Ned demanded. “God knows I’m glad to see any kind of a man.”
After all, wasn’t that good sense? Trapping, fox-farming, any one of a dozen undertakings took white men into these northern realms. Conquering his own ridiculous fears—fears that partook of the nature of actual forewarnings—Knutsen drove his oars with added force into the water. The boat leaped forward: in a moment more they touched the bank.
Their deliverer, a great blond man seemingly of Northeastern Europe, was already at the water’s edge, watching them with a strange and inexplicable glitter in gray, sardonic eyes. He was a mighty, bearded man, clothed in furs; already he was bent, his hands on the bow of the boat. Already Ned was climbing out upon the shore.
Partly to remove the silly dismay that had overwhelmed him, partly because it was the first thought that would come to the mind of a wayfarer of the sea, Knutsen turned with a question. “What island is dis?” he asked.
The stranger turned with a grim, meaning smile. “Hell,” he answered simply.
Both Ned and Knutsen stood erect to stare at him. The wind made curious whispers down through the long slit of the river valley. “Hell?” Knutsen echoed. “Is dat its name——”
“It’s the name I gave it. You’ll think it’s that before you get away.”
XIII
Thestranger’s voice was deep and full, so far-carrying, so masterful, that it might have been the articulation of the raw elements among which he lived, rather than the utterance of human vocal chords. It held all his listeners; it wakened Lenore from the apathy brought by cold and exposure. They had wondered, at first, that a member of the white race should make his home on this remote and desolate isle, but after they had heard his voice they knew that this was his fitting environment. If any man’s home should be here, in this lost and snowy desert, here was the man.
The background of the North was reflected in his voice. It was as if he had caught its tone from the sea and the wild, through long acquaintance with them. It was commanding, passionate, and yet, to a man of rare sensitiveness, it would have had an unmistakable quality of beauty; at least, something that is like beauty and which can be heard in many of Nature’s voices: the chant of the wolf pack on the ridge, or even certain sounds of beating waves. The explanation was simply that he had lived so long in the North, he was so intrinsically its child in nature and temperament, that it had begun to mold him after its own raw forces. The fact that his voice had a deeply sardonic note was wholly in character. The North, too, has a cruel, grim humor that breaks men’s hearts.
His accent was plainly not that of an American. He had not been born to the English tongue; very plainly he had learned it, thoroughly and laboriously. His own tongue still echoed faintly in the way he mouthed some of his vowels, and in a distinct purring note, as of a giant cat, in his softer sounds.
Ned observed these things more in an inner mind, rather than with his conscious intelligence. Outwardly he was simply listening to what the man said. The note of dimness and unreality was wholly gone now. The voice was indescribably vivid; the man himself was compellingly vivid too. It was no longer to be wondered at that he had appeared of such gigantic proportions when they had seen him across the snow. In reality he was a giant of a man, about six feet and a half in height, huge of body, mighty of arm and limb, weighing, stripped down to muscle and sinew, practically three hundred pounds. Beside him, Knutsen no longer gave the image of strength.
Even in his own city, surrounded by the civilization that he loved, Ned couldn’t have passed this man by with a casual glance. In the first place there is something irresistibly compelling about mere physical strength. The strength of this man beside the sea seemed resistless. It was to be seen in his lithe motions; his great, long-fingered, big-knuckled hands; in the lurch of his shoulders; in his great thighs and long, powerful arms. He was plainly, as far as age went, at the apex of his strength,—not over forty-one, not less than thirty-eight. He drew up the boat with one hand, reaching the other to help Lenore out on to the shore.
It came about, because he reached it toward Lenore, that Ned noticed his hand before ever he really took time to study his face. It was a mighty, muscular hand,—a reaching, clasping, clenching, killing hand. It crushed the lives from things that its owner didn’t like. On the back and extending almost to the great, purple nails was blond, coarse hair.
But it wasn’t mere brute strength that made him the compelling personality that he was. There was also the strength of an iron purpose, a self-confidence gained by battle with and conquest of the raw forces of his island home. Here was a man who knew no law but his own. And he was as remorseless as the snow that sifted down upon him.
If Lenore’s thought processes had been the same as when she had left her city home, she would have been stirred to envy by his garb. There was little about him that suggested intercourse with the outside world. He was dressed from head to foot in furs and skins of the most rare and beautiful kinds. His jacket and trousers seemed to be of lynx, his cap was unmistakably silver fox. But it came about that neither she nor Ned did more than casually notice his garb: both were held and darkly fascinated by the great, bearded face.
The blond hair grew in a great mat about his lips and jowls. His nose was straight, his eyebrows heavy, all his features remarkably even and well-proportioned. But none of these lesser features could be noticed because of the compelling attraction of his gray, vivid eyes.
Ned didn’t know why he was startled, so carried out of himself when he looked at them. In the first place they were the index of what was once, and perhaps still, a lively and penetrating intelligence. This island man, however mad he might be, was not a mere physical hulk,—an ox with dull nerves and stupid brain. The vivid orbs indicated a nervous system that was highly developed and sensitive, though heaven knew what slant, what paths from the normal, the development took. They were not the eyes of a man blind to beauty, dull to art. He was likely fully sensitive to the dreadful, eerie beauty of his own northern home; if anything, it got home to him too deeply and invoked in him its own terrible mood. They were sardonic eyes too,—the eyes of a man who, secure in his own strength, knew men’s weaknesses and knew how to make use of them.
Yet none of these traits got down to the real soul of the man. They didn’t even explain the wild and piercing glitter in the gray orbs. Whatever his creed was, he was a fanatic in it. An inhuman zeal marked every word, every glance. There is a proper balance to maintain in life, a quietude, most of all a temperance in all things; and to lose it means to pass beyond the pale. This island man was irremediably steeped in some ghastly philosophy of his own; a dreadful code of life outside the laws of heaven and earth. Some evil disease, not named in any work on medicine, had distilled its dire toxin into his heart.
There is no law of God or man north of sixty-three,—and the thing held good with him. But there is devil’s law; and it was the law on which his life was bent.
It was the most evil, the most terrible face that any one of these four had ever seen. The art that touched him was never true art, the art of the soul and the heart, but something diseased, something uncanny and diabolical, beyond the pale of life. His genius was an evil genius: they saw it in every motion, in every line of his wicked face.
There was no kindly warmth, no sympathy, no human understanding either in his voice or his face. Plainly he was as remorseless as the remorseless land in which he lived. Now, as they looked, his hairy hands might have been the rending paws of a beast.
Perhaps it was madness, perhaps some weird abnormality that only a great psychologist could trace, perhaps merely wickedness without redemption, but whatever the nature of the disease that was upon him it had had a ghastly and inhuman influence. The heart in his breast had lost the high, human attributes of mercy and sympathy. They knew in one glance that here was a man that knew no restraints other than those prompted by his own desires. In him the self-will and resolution that carries so many men into power or crime was developed to thenthpower; he was a fitting child of the savage powers of nature among which he lived.
“Pardon me for not making myself known sooner,” he began in his deep, sardonic voice. “My name is Doomsdorf—trapper, and seemingly owner of this island. At least I’m the only living man on it, except yourselves.” His speech, though careless and queerly accented, had no mark of ignorance or ill-breeding. “I told you the island’s name—believe me, it fits it perfectly. Welcome to it——”
Ned straightened, white-faced. “Mr. Doomsdorf, these girls are chilled through—one of them is near to collapse from exposure. Will you save that till later and help me get them to a fire?”
For all the creeping terror that was possessing his veins, Ned made a brave effort to hold his voice steady. The man looked down at him, his lip curling. “Pardon my negligence,” he replied easily. “Of course she isn’t used to the cold yet—but that will come in time.” He bowed slightly to the shivering girl on the shore. “If you follow my tracks up to the wood, you’ll find my shack—and there’s a fire in the stove.” He looked familiarly into her face. “You’re not really cold, you know—you justthinkyou are. Walk fast, and it will warm you up.”
Ned bent, seized an armful of blankets from the boat, then stepped to Lenore’s side. “The captain will help you, Miss Gilbert,” he said to Bess. Then he and the golden-haired girl he loved started together through the six-inch snowfall toward the woods. Bess, stricken and appalled, but yet not knowing which way to turn, took the trail behind them. But Knutsen still waited on the shore, beside the boat.
He came of a strong breed, and he was known in his own world as a strong man. It was part of the teaching of that world, and always the instinct of such men as he to look fate in the face, never to evade it, never to seek shelter in false hope. He knew the world better than any of the three who had come with him; the menace that they sensed but dimly but which dismayed and oppressed them was only too real to him. Even now, out of his sight, Ned was trying to make himself believe that the man was likely but a simple trapper, distorted into a demon by the delirium brought on by the dreadful night just passed; but Knutsen made no such attempt. He saw in Doomsdorf a perfect embodiment of the utter ruthlessness and brutality that the Far North sometimes bestows on its sons.
Knutsen knew this north country. He knew of what it was capable,—the queer, uncanny quirks that it put in the souls of men. Doomsdorf, incredible to Ned and Bess, was wholly plausible to him. He feared him to the depths of his heart, yet in some measure, at least, these three were in his charge, and if worst came to worst, he must stand between them and this island devil with his own life. He had stayed on the shore after the others had gone so that he might find out the truth.
He was not long in learning. Through some innate, vague, almost inexplicable desire to shelter his three charges and to spare them the truth, he wanted to wait until all three of them had disappeared in the wood; but even this was denied him. Lenore and Ned, it is true, had already vanished into the patch of forest; but Bess seemed to be walking slowly, waiting for him. Doomsdorf was bent, now, unloading the stores and remaining blankets from the canoe; but suddenly, with one motion, he showed Knutsen where he stood.
With one great lurch of his shoulders he turned over the empty boat and shoved it off into the sea. The first wave, catching it, drove it out of reach. “You won’t need that again,” he said.
With a half-uttered, sobbing gasp that no man had heard from his lips before, Knutsen sprang to rescue it. It was the greatest error of his life. Even he did not realize the full might and remorselessness of the foe that opposed him, or he would never have wasted precious seconds, put himself at a disadvantage by entering the water, in trying to retrieve the boat. He would have struck instantly, in one absolute, desperate attempt to wipe the danger forever from his path. But in the instant of need, his brain did not work true. He could not exclude from his thought the disastrous fallacy that all hope, all chances to escape from hell lay only in this flimsy craft, floating a few feet from him in shallow water.
In an instant he had seized it, and standing hip-deep in the icy water, he turned to face the blond man on the shore. The latter roared once with savage mirth, a sound that carried far abroad the snowy desolation; then he sobered, watching with glittering eyes.
“Let it go,” he ordered simply. His right arm lifted slowly, as if in inadvertence, and rested almost limp across his breast. His blond beard hid the contemptuous curl of his lips.
“Damn you, I won’t!” Knutsen answered. “You can’t keep us here——”
“Let it go, I say. You are the one that’s damned. And you fool, you don’t know the words that are written over the gates of the hell you’ve come to—‘Abandon hope, ye who enter here!’ You and your crowd will never leave this island till you die!”
Knutsen’s hand moved toward his hip. In the days of the gun fights, in the old North, it had never moved more swiftly. In this second of need he had remembered his pistol.
But he remembered it too late. And his hand, though fast, was infinitely slow. The great arm that lay across Doomsdorf’s breast suddenly flashed out and up. The blue steel of a revolver barrel streaked in the air, and a shot cracked over the sea.
Knutsen was already loosed from the bonds that held him. Deliverance had come quickly. His face, black before with wrath, grew blank; and for a long instant he groped impotently, open hands reaching. But the lead had gone straight home; and there was no need of a second shot. The late captain of theCharonswayed, then pitched forward into the gray waters.