The Incendiary Part 33

They had run out of talk and were almost drowsing when the great crash came. Have you felt your heart jump when a pistol-shot smites the silence? No crack of land ordnance could inspire the fear that resounding b.u.mp did in the b.r.e.a.s.t.s of the apprehensive girls.

"A rock!" was the thought of each, but they only expressed their terror in an inarticulate shriek. Then the whimpering of women and the cries of men were heard in the saloon.

"We are sinking!" cried some one, and the girls rushed out. A hundred white-clad forms darted to and fro like gnats in a swarm, or clung together, wringing their hands in misery. Some of the men fought to unbar the doors. But they were bolted from the outside. The whole cabin was penned in there to drown. Then each one felt for his dearest.

"Tristram!" moaned Rosalie, knocking at his stateroom door. "Tristram!" But there came no answer. "He is out on the deck! He is swept away and drowned!" she cried, with truer tears than the imagined sorrows of Desdemona had ever drawn from her eyes. But Tristram was safe in the pilot's box, where Capt. Keen was signaling the engineer to reverse his engines; and the engineer, shut in amid the deafening clangor of his machinery, ignorant of what had happened but trained to his duty, obeyed promptly his bell and forced the great vessel back.

The headlights of the Yarmouth had been doused out long before, and there was no lantern that could live in that surge, even if it were possible to hang a second one aloft From time to time the captain had ordered a rocket sent up, to warn approaching vessels, for the air was densely opaque. Only out of the gloom before them, just before the shock came, Tristram could see a long row of lights, feeble and flickering. His imagination constructed the broadside of a steamship about them and once it seemed that he really did catch a vague, shadowy outline. But the reality became certain to another sense. Before the Yarmouth's engines were reversed and her bow disengaged itself, a wail of terror reached him out of the night, and a tearing as of parted timbers. Then hoa.r.s.e shouts were heard from the emptiness soaring high above the wind.

"We stove in her side," said the captain. Then a signal rocket, hissing into the quenching rain, told him of his fellow's distress. The Yarmouth still receded. The double row of lights was withdrawn into the gloom. But the wailing increased and from the covered cabin below rose the responsive clamor of the pa.s.sengers.

"Say that we have struck a vessel," telephoned the captain to the steward. After several repet.i.tions the message was understood and it quieted the half-clad throng a little. But anxiety was legible on every face.

Twice more the signal of distress went up and the captain answered it, though helpless to a.s.sist. Then the air was blank.

"Head her east," said the captain to the pilot. He knew by the lights that the other vessel was pointed to the larboard when she crossed his bow. He could not back forever or heave to in that sea. He must circ.u.mnavigate the vessel or the vortex if she were sunk. So he nosed his prow oceanward into the teeth of the wind. Under these circ.u.mstances the headway of his boat was slow.

"Ahoy!"

Was it a voice from the darkness? A huge wave rose over them like a cliff and hurled itself against the strong gla.s.s of the pilot's window. In a moment they were soused and the wind blowing in upon them told them that their brittle sheath was shattered. But the electric globes still cast their white gleams over the foredeck and revealed a dark object that was not there before.

"A boat!" cried Tristram.

"Save them!" shouted Capt. Keen, rushing down the steps, with the artist at his heels. It was indeed a lifeboat, which had been carried on the crest of a billow clear over the Yarmouth's gunwale and left high, if not dry. Only five forms could be seen--three of them stirring, the other two motionless. All were men.

"Climb!" shouted Keen, seizing one of the limp bodies in his arms. Tristram caught up the other and staggered back in the direction of the light, the three wrecked men following and grappling at them in their bewilderment. Another wave like the last and they were lost, all seven. But these great surges come in rhythmic intervals. Rescuers and rescued reached the pilot house in safety.

"Who are you, shipmates?" asked the captain, pouring brandy down the mouths of the unconscious men. The others answered in German.

"The Hamburg liner, Osric," translated Tristram. "She broke her rudder and was driven off her course by the gale."

"Heaven save us from meeting any more such driftwood," said the pilot unsteadily with a hiccough.

"Were any other boats out?" asked Capt. Keen. Tristram interpreted question and answer.

"Two others, but they were swamped. All on board are lost."

A thrill went through the strong men. Usage does not render sailors callous to the perils of the sea. Death under the ocean is still the most awe-inspiring of fates--the doom of the irrecoverable body, of the skeleton lying on the bottom, like a coral freak.

"Mostly immigrants from Germany and Sweden," answered the spokesman to the next question. All five were common sailors. They had waited their turn and the captain had ordered them into the lifeboat when it came. He himself had stood by his sinking ship to the end.

In a lull of the breaking seas, Tristram and Capt. Keen picked their way down into the cabin. The captain's appearance was a signal for a cheer. He addressed the pa.s.sengers briefly, outlined the terrible event and a.s.sured them that, as lightning never strikes twice in the same spot, they might turn in and count on a clear voyage oceanward for the rest of the night. He could not control the weather or promise them sleep. But he felt so safe himself that he had just come down to retire for his own spell of slumber.

This little lie was one of those which the recording angel will blot away with tears. The old salt would no more have slept that night than he would have taken a dose of poison. Even for the few minutes he was below he had been as uneasy within as a young mother when she sees her baby in the arms of some one whose carelessness she has good reason to dread. The pilot was in liquor, and Capt. Keen, making a quick tour aft so that every one might get a view of him and a cheery word, together with a brazen repet.i.tion of his salutary invention, simply turned into the cook's room forward and swung himself out by its skylight-hatch. Meanwhile Tristram elbowed his way through the crowd to Rosalie. His reappearance soothed her, but she was still hysterical, and the good offices of the other two ladies were found seasonable during the night.

CHAPTER XLV.

ON DIGBY Sh.o.r.e.

Daylight rose, gray and hollow-eyed, on the Atlantic. The sun was merely a moving brightness in the sky. Ocean, the blind t.i.tan, still heaved and roared, playing his part in some grander drama than ours of flesh and blood--ingulfing sailor or bark as we crush the poor gnat toward whom neither pagan sage nor Christian doctor enjoins mercy--cruel without enmity, indifferent without contempt, divider or uniter of continents according to his chance-born mood.

The storm had scarcely begun to die. But with a clear outlook forward it was possible once more for the st.u.r.dy Yarmouth to resume her course. With Capt Keen himself at the wheel, she steamed into the narrow harbor of the little city whose name she bore, situated on the nearest eastward tip of the Nova Scotia peninsula, half a day late, but with her 300 pa.s.sengers safe and sound.

Several days later, our party of four were peacefully rowing across the calm waters of Digby bay--that isleless harbor of purest ultramarine, where the Bay of Fundy has cloven its way through peaks still wooded to the water's edge and lifts and lowers its huge tides as far north as Annapolis, at the head of the valley of Evangeline. Chance would have it that this resort was the destination of the Marches as well as Emily and Beulah; and the acquaintance made on shipboard under such unusual circ.u.mstances was already ripening into something like friendship--perhaps more than friendship--between Tristram and Beulah Ware.

She was his opposite, his complementary color, as he said to Rosalie, and so she harmonized with him and perhaps comprehended him, as Rosalie at times did not. In only one thing did she agree with Tristram's sister. She misunderstood his irony; for her own speech was yea, yea.

"Let us cross over to the camp of the Micmacs," proposed the artist, resting on his oars.

"Are they real Indians?" asked Emily.

"Full-blooded. See their tepees." A cl.u.s.ter of conical tents could be seen rising from the dark foliage on the hillside. For Digby rises from the water with a slope like a toboggan slide all the way up to the white cottages on its crest.

"There is a specimen," said Tristram, as a canoe skimmed by them. "Isn't he n.o.ble? The great face, the grim mouth, the high cheek-bones, the straight hair--it is a bronze mask of Saturn. I may utilize him."

"When?"

"When I carve my life group for the Academy's grand prize."

"Have you chosen your subject?"

"Driftwood Pickers at the Sea Level."

Beulah Ware looked up. She had suggested it the day before, while strolling alone with the man of hazy purposes.

The boat was beached without difficulty and the ladies stepped ash.o.r.e--Beulah Ware collectedly, as usual, but Emily and Rosalie as warily as you may have seen a lame pigeon alighting.

"Let us follow my leader," said Tristram, meaning the brown canoeist, who had shouldered his craft and was climbing the beach.

"What is that?" cried Emily, pointing to an object that was tossing on the sands.

"A body," said the others, recoiling, but Tristram walked in the direction indicated. It proved on closer inspection to be the body of a woman, stout and tall. Her long yellow hair floated in the surf, but the features were swollen beyond recognition. It was impossible to tell whether she was old or young. Only her clothing, which was thick and of foreign style, denoted a woman of the poorer cla.s.s.

"Is it a body?" asked Rosalie, apparently doubting the evidence of her eyes. The quick a.s.semblage of a crowd rendered an answer unnecessary. There were men and women watching all along the Nova Scotia coast in those weary days. Schooners and smacks had put out before the storm, perhaps to be blown far out of their course and suffer the hardships of hunger and shipwreck, perhaps to founder in midocean and never to return. So the body rolling in the surf at the water's edge had been espied by others before the party of four landed, and there was a converging stream of searchers from bush and cottage, and even from the lonely tepees.

"Search her pockets," said one, and the woman's dress was torn open. A packet of papers came out, but the ink had run and the paper was as soft as jelly.

"She has been in the water a week," cried another.

"Perhaps it is a body from the Osric," suggested a boy.

The party of four shrunk in greater horror. There were rumors of lifeboats that had been launched and swamped from the sunken steamer. Could one of the bodies have been carried up the Bay of Fundy on its swift-running tide, forced by a current through Digby Gut, and cast ash.o.r.e on this unfrequented beach?

"See if her linen is marked?" asked a woman who held a baby. But the search proved fruitless. No stenciled initials, not even a brand on the shoes, to identify the unfortunate. A truck was suggested to carry her up to the town.

"One moment," said Tristram, "her ring may be engraved."

The slender gold circlet was deeply imbedded in the flesh, but a fisherman ruthlessly cut it loose with his knife. Tristram held it up to the light and read a name from the inside.

"Bertha Lund," he read.

Emily Barlow turned pale and glanced at Beulah Ware. If she could have looked across the ocean to the city just then and seen Inspector McCausland closeted with the district attorney, she would have been confirmed in her fears. The detective was scanning a list of the pa.s.sengers on the Osric.

"Bertha Lund, Upsala, Sweden. That is her birthplace. She was to return on the Osric," he said, uneasily.

"Then it must be she," answered the district attorney. "It is most unfortunate. However, we have her testimony at the hearing. We do not rely solely upon her."

But Emily did rely solely upon Bertha's knowledge, and her heart sunk within her. Without Bertha, there was only Robert to describe the room as she wished it described. And would people believe Robert in so novel, so miraculous, a junction of circ.u.mstances as her theory demanded?

"Read that again, please," she cried to Tristram.

"Bertha Lund," Tristram seemed puzzled a moment by the third word, "Bertha Lund, Upsala."

CHAPTER XLVI.

TURNPIKE TOLL.

"So to-morrow is the day of the trial, Miss Barlow?"

Mrs. Riley was pinning the bandage on Walter's neck, while Emily b.u.t.toned his jacket. She and the quondam Whistler had become fast friends, especially since the day of the struggle in s.h.a.garach's office, and now that his burns were healing and he was able to get out they had arranged a Sunday afternoon excursion to Hemlock grove, with some vague hope of visiting the site of the demolished hut, if Walter's strength could carry him so far. There would be no lack of guides, for the spot had already become locally famous.

"Yes," answered Emily, "the talesmen have been sifted down to twelve at last."

"May the good Lord put mercy in their hearts," prayed Mrs. Riley.

"I wish it was a jury of ladies," said Walter.

"Why, ladies are never selected for the jury," cried his mother.

"Jurywomen is a word not yet included in the dictionaries," smiled Emily.

"But they are all so kind," said Walter simply, but in such a way that his mother and Emily might each take half of the compliment. The bright slum boy was already losing all trace of his plebeian a.s.sociations, as the innate aristocracy of his nature a.s.serted itself. How luckily he was placed, if he could have foreseen. To begin at the lower-most round of the ladder, but with the unconquerable instinct in him to climb; and so at last, on the topmost round, to have the whole of life for a retrospect.

Mrs. Riley bade them a proud good-by and watched them from her window boarding the car. The down-town ride on a Sunday is always curious, for the desertion of the usually crowded streets gives them a foreign appearance. Emily was commenting on this when Walter called her attention to something in the sky.

"Look, it's a man," he said, pointing almost vertically upward.

"Where?" she asked, leaning forward.

"On the top of the Amory building. He is calling for help."

The Amory building was the tallest structure in the city, the tenants in the sixteenth story enjoying a view that swept in the entire harbor and flattened the men walking in the avenues below to the dimensions of crawling flies.

"We can change cars here, Walter. Let us get off and see."

From the sidewalk Emily could distinguish the minute figure of a man leaning over the parapet around the roof, and shouting through his hands to attract attention.

"Perhaps it is on fire," she said in alarm, framing the thought that lay uppermost in her mind.

"I think he wants to get down," suggested Walter, although not a word of the man's vociferations could be heard.

"Let us speak to the policeman," said Emily, just as a large hat came sailing down on Walter's head. It crossed her mind that the broad brim had a familiar look. The patrolman followed her index finger with his glance and presently there was a knot of pa.s.sers-by doing likewise. Then the knot grew to a crowd, and the crowd to a mult.i.tude. Meanwhile the officer had hunted up the janitor of the building and both entered through the great carved doors. About five minutes later they came down, with a heavily laden, portly gentleman, who seemed taken aback when the crowd hurrahed him.

"Dr. Silsby!" cried Emily. He looked about in surprise.

"Miss Barlow," he said, shaking his head, "here's a to-do. I suppose you'll go right over and tell that Rob."

"Tell him what?"

"Tell him I got lost in the heart of the city I was born in," grumbled the botanist so that she could hardly help laughing. "Well, what are you sniggling at?" he shouted at the crowd, who fell back a little at this.

"And were you lost up there?"

"Haven't had a bite to eat since yesterday noon. Made a call on that ninny, Hodgkins, about his confounded will. Judge is going to decide against him and we'll have our academia after all."

"Good! Good!" cried Emily, clapping her hands.

"Office on the sixteenth floor. Ninny was out. Took my specimens up to the roof. Got worked up. Scribbled notes for my new lecture on----"

"I know. Rob told me. On the beneficent activity of the great horned owl. How interesting!"

Dr. Silsby glared.

"Janitor missed me. Didn't notice the time. Locked out. Slept four hours all night, and now I'm hoa.r.s.e from bawling ten. What's the matter with Sleepy Hollow? Are they all in bed?"

"Why, this is Sunday morning," explained Emily, repressing her merriment.

"They ought to have ladders up there, so a man could climb down," grumbled Dr. Silsby.

Walter thought this a somewhat unreasonable demand.

"You might have descended by the mail chute," said Emily, laughing outright, "and then the postman would have collected you just before breakfast."