Cursed

“It’s all right,” judged he. “This is an important job. It mustn’t be made a mess of.”

He looked for and found a few cartridges, and carefully loaded the weapon, then snapped it shut, and laid it on the desk. The sound of Dr. Filhiol, coming with another cane along the hall, caused him to slide the gun into the drawer. Filhiol knocked at the door, and Briggs arose to open it. He showed no signs of perturbation. A calm serenity glowed in his eyes.

“Isn’t it time you got your writing finished and went to bed?” the doctor demanded tartly.

“Almost time. I’m just finishing up. I sha’n’t be long now. Tell me, how’s Ruddy?”

“We’ve made a fair job of it, and Ezra’s gone to his room. He’s taking everything terribly to heart. Anything I can do for you?”

“Nothing, thank you. Good night.”

The captain’s hand enfolded Filhiol’s. Neither by any undue pressure nor by word did he give the doctor any hint of the fact that this good-by was final. The old doctor turned and very wearily stumped away up-stairs. Briggs turned back into his cabin.

“A good, true friend,” said he. “Another one I’m sorry to leave, just as I’m sorry to leave the girl and Ezra. But – well – ”

At his task once more, he fetched from the safe his black metal cash-box, and set himself to looking over a few deeds, mortgages and other papers, making sure that all was in order for the welfare of Hal. He reread his will, assuring himself that nothing could prevent Hal from coming into the property, and also that a bequest to Ezra was in correct form. This done, he replaced the papers in the safe.

On his desk a little clock was ticking, each motion of its balance-wheel bringing nearer the tragedy impending. The captain glanced at it.

“Getting late,” said he. “Only one more thing to do now, and then I’m ready.”

He set himself to write a letter that should make all things clear to Hal. But first he brought out the revolver once more, and laid it on the desk as a kind of memento mori, lest in the writing his soul should weaken.

The lamp, shining down upon the old man’s gnarled fingers as they painfully traced the words of explanation and farewell, also struck high-lights from the revolver.

The captain’s eyes, now and then leaving the written pages as he paused to think, rested upon the gun. At sight of it he smiled; and once he reached out, caressed it and smiled.

CHAPTER XL

ON THE KITTIWINK

When Hal left Snug Haven, he bent his shoulders to the storm and with his suit-cases plowed through the gathering dusk toward Hadlock’s Cove.

Cold, slashing rain and boistering gusts left his wrath uncooled. Ugly, brutalized, he kept his way past the smithy – past Laura’s house, and so with glowering eyes on into the evening that caught and ravened at him.

The sight of Laura’s house filled him with an access of rage. That calm security of shaded windows behind the rain-scourged hedge seemed to typify the girl’s protection against him. He twisted his mouth into an ugly grin.

“Think you’re safe, don’t you?” he growled, pausing a moment to glower at the house. “Think I can’t get you, eh? I haven’t even begun yet!”

In the turmoil of his mind, no clear plan had as yet taken form. He knew only that he had a boat and full supplies, that from him the ocean held no secrets, that his muscles and his will had never yet known defeat, and that the girl was his if he could take her.

“She’ll turn me down cold and get away with it, will she?” he snarled. “She will – like hell!”

Forward he pushed again, meeting no one, and so passed Geyser Rock, now booming under the charges of the surf. He skirted a patch of woods, flailed by the wind, and beyond this turned through a stone wall, to follow a path that led down to the cove. On either side of the path stretched a rolling field, rich with tall grasses, with daisies, buttercups, milfoil and devil’s paint-brush, drenched and beaten down in the dusk by the sweep of the storm.

Louder and more loud rose, fell, the thunders of the sea, as Hal approached the rocky dune at the far side of the field – a dune that on its other edge sank to a shingle beach that bordered the cove.

To eastward, this beach consolidated itself into the rocky headland of Barberry Point, around which the breakers were curving to hurl themselves on the shingle. The wind, however, was at this point almost parallel with the shore. Hal reckoned, as he tramped across the field, that with good judgment and stiff work he could get the Kittiwink to sea at once.

And after that, what? He did not know. No definite idea existed in that half-crazed, passion-scourged brain. The driving power of his strength accursed, took no heed of anything but flight. Away, away, only to be away!

“God!” he panted, stumbling up the dune to its top, where salt spray and stinging rain skirled upon him in skittering drives. He dropped his burdens, and flung out both huge arms toward the dark, tumbling void of waters, streaked with crawling lines of white. “God! that’s what I want! That’s what they’re trying to keep me away from! I’m going to have it now – by God, I am!”

He stood there a moment, his oilskin hat slapping about his face. At his right, three hundred yards away or so, he could just glimpse the dark outlines of Jim Gordon’s little store that supplied rough needs of lobstermen and fishers. Hal’s lip curled with scorn of the men he knew were gathered in that dingy, smoky place, swapping yarns and smoking pipes. They preferred that to the freedom of the night, the storm, the sea! At them he shook his fist.

“There’s not one of you that’s half the man I am!” he shouted. “You sit in there and run me down. I know! You’re doing it now – telling how gramp had to pay because I licked a bully, and how I’ve got to apologize! But you don’t dare come out into a night like this. I can outsail you and outfight you all – and to hell with you!”

His rage somehow a little eased, he turned to the task immediately confronting him. The beach sloped sharply to the surf. A litter of driftwood, kelp and mulched rubbish was swirling back and forth among the churning pebbles that with each refluent wave went clattering down in a mad chorus. Here, there, drawn up out of harm’s way, lay lobster-pots and dories. Just visible as a white blur tossing on the obscure waters, the Kittiwink rode at her buoy.

“Great little boat!” cried Hal. A vast longing swept over him to be aboard, and away. The sea was calling his youth, strength, daring.

Laura? And would he go without the girl? Yes. Sometime, soon perhaps, he would come back, would seize her, carry her away; but for now that plan had grown as vaguely formless as his destination. Fumes of liquor in his brain, of passion in his heart, blent with the roaring confusion of the tempest. All was confusion, all a kind of wild and orgiastic dream, culmination of heredity, of a spirit run amok.

Night, storm and wind shouted to the savage in this man. And, standing erect there in the dark, arms up to fleeing cloud and ravening gale, he howled back with mad laughter:

“Coming now! By God, I’m coming now!”

There was foam on his lips as he strode down the beach, flung the suit-cases into a dory – and with a run and a huge-shouldered shove across the shingle fairly flung the boat into the surf.

Waist-deep in chilling smothers of brine, he floundered, dragged himself into the dory that shipped heavy seas, and flung the oars on to the thole-pins. He steadied her nose into the surf, and with a few strong pulls got her through the tumble. A matter of two or three minutes, with such strength as lay in his arms of steel, brought him to the lee of the Kittiwink’s stern. He hove the suit-cases to the deck of the dancing craft, then scrambled aboard and made the painter fast.

Again he laughed, exultingly. Now for the first time in his life his will could be made law. Now he stood on his own deck, with plenty of supplies below, and – above, about him – the unlimited power of the gale to drive him any whither he should choose.

He strode to the companionway, his feet sure on the swaying deck, his body lithely meeting every plunge, and slid back the hatch-cover. Down into the cabin he pitched the cases and followed them. He struck a match. It died. He cursed bitterly, tried again, and lighted the cabin-lamp. His eyes, with the affection of ownership, roved around the little place, taking in the berths, the folding-table, the stools. He threw the suit-cases into a berth, opened one and took out a square-face, which he uncorked and tipped high.

“Ah!” he sighed. “Some class!” He set the bottle in the rack and breathed deeply. “Nice little berths, eh? Laura – she’d look fine here. She’d fit great, as crew. And if she gave me any of her lip, then – ”

His fist, doubled, swayed under the lamp-shine as he surveyed it proudly.

“Great little boat,” judged Hal. “She’ll outsail ’em all, and I’m the boy to make her walk!”

Huge, heavy, evil-faced, he stood there, swaying as the Kittiwink rode the swells. He cast open his reefer, took out pipe and tobacco, and lighted up. As he sucked at the stem, his hard lips, corded throat and great jaws gave an impression of brutal power, in no wise differing from that of old Alpheus Briggs, half a hundred years ago.

“Make me go to school and wear a blue ribbon,” he gibed, his voice a contrabass to the shrilling of the wind aloft in the rig, the groaning and creaking of the timbers. “Make me go round apologizing to drunken bums. Like – hell!”

A gleam of metal from the opened suit-case attracted his eyes. He took up the kris, and with vast approval studied it. The feel of the lotus-bud handle seemed grateful to his palm. Its balance joyed him. The keen, wavy blade, maculated with the rust of blood and brine, and with the groove where lay another stain whose meaning he knew not, held for him a singular fascination. Back, forth he slashed the weapon, whistling it through the air, flashing it under the lamp-light.

“Fine!” he approved, with thickened speech. “Glad I got it – might come handy in a pinch, what?”

He stopped swinging the kris, and once more observed it, more closely still. Tentatively he ran his thumb along the edge, testing it, then scratched with some inchoate curiosity at the poison crystallized in the groove.

“Wonder what that stuff is, anyhow?” said he. “Doesn’t look like the rest. Maybe it’s the blood of some P. I., like McLaughlin. That ought to make a dirty-looking stain, same as this. Maybe it will, some of these days, if he crosses my bows. Maybe it will at that!”

CHAPTER XLI

FATE STRIKES

Hal tossed the kris into the berth, and was just about to reach for the bottle again when a thump-thump-thumping along the hull startled his attention.