IN EXTREMIS

It would be difficult to tell how long the wounded boy lay there, but after a certain time, some vague glimmering of consciousness returned. No light came back. Neither was motion possible to him. His understanding now was merely pain, confusion and a great roaring wind and wave. Utter weakness gripped his body; but more than this seemed to enchain him. By no effort of his reviving will could he move hand or foot; and even the slow breath he took, each respiration a stab of agony, seemed for some reason a mighty effort.

Though Hal knew it not, already the curarÉ was at work, the curarÉ whose terrible effect is this: that it paralyzes every muscle, first the voluntaries, then those of the respiratory centers and of the heart itself. Yet he could think and feel. CurarÉ does not numb sensation or attack the brain. It strikes its victims down by rendering them more helpless than an infant; and then, fingering its way to the breath and to the blood, closes on those a grip that has one outcome only.

Hal Briggs, who had so gloried in the strength and swift control of all his muscles, who had so wrought evil and violent things, trusting to his unbeatable power, now lay there, chained, immobile, paralyzed.

He thought, after a few vain efforts to move:

“I must be badly cut to be as weak as this. I must be bled almost to death. I’m going to die. That’s certain!”

Still, he was not afraid. The soul of him confronted death, unterrified. Even while his laboring heart struggled against the slow instillation of the curarÉ, and even while his lungs caught sluggishly at the air, his mind was undaunted.

He wanted light, but there was none. A velvet dark enveloped everything—a dark in which the creaking fabric of the Kittiwink heaved, plunged till it rolled his inert body back against the shell of the craft, then forward again.

“I got some of them, anyhow,” he reflected, with strange calmness. “They didn’t get away without a lot of punishment. If they hadn’t knifed me, I’d have cleaned up the whole bunch!”

A certain satisfaction filled his thoughts. If one must die, it is good to know the enemy has taken grievous harm.

Still, what, after all, did it matter? He felt so very languid, so transfixed with that insistent pain in the right lung! Even though he had killed them all, would that have recompensed him for the failure of all his cherished plans, for the loss of the life that was to have meant so wildly much to him?

He felt a warm oozing on his breast, and knew blood was still seeping. His lips tasted salty, but he could not even spit away the blood on them. CurarÉ is of a hundred different types. This, which he had received, had numbed his muscles beyond any possibility of waking them to action. A few vain efforts convinced him he could not move. So there he lay, suffering, wondering how any loss of blood—so long as life remained—could so paralyze him.

His thoughts drifted to Snug Haven, to his grandfather, to Ezra, to Laura, but now in more confusion. He realized that he was fainting and could do nothing to prevent it. A humming, different from the storm-wind, welled up in his ears. He felt that he was sinking down, away. Then all at once he ceased alike to think, to feel.

When next he came to some vague consciousness, he sensed—millions of miles away—a touch on his shoulder, a voice in his ears. He knew that voice; and yet, somehow, he could not tell whose voice it was. He understood that his head was being raised. Very dimly, through closed eyelids that he could not open, he perceived the faint glimmer of a light.

“Hal!” he heard his name. And then again: “Hal!”

The futile effort to move, to answer, spent his last forces. Once more the blackness of oblivion received him mercifully.

“Hal! Oh, God! Hal, speak to me! Answer me!” Laura’s voice trembled, broke as she pleaded. “Oh—they’ve killed you! They’ve killed you!”

With eyes of terror she peered down at him. In her shaking hand the little electric search-lamp sent its trembling beam to illuminate the terrible sight there on the cabin floor. The girl could get only broken impressions—a pale, wan face; closed eyes that would not open; a fearful welter of blood on throat and chest.

“Look at me! Speak to me! You aren’t dead—look at me! It’s Laura! Hal—Hal!”

Her words were disjointed. For a moment presence of mind left her. For a moment, she was just a frightened girl, suddenly confronted by this horrible thing, by the broken, dying body of the man she had so loved. And while that moment lasted she cried out; she gathered Hal to her breast; she called to him and called again, and got no answer.

But soon her first anguish passed. She whipped back her reason and forced herself to think. The prescience she had felt of evil had indeed come true. The furtive, dark figures that from her window she had seen slinking toward Hadlock’s Cove, had indeed sought Hal just as she had felt that they were seeking him. And the numb grief that, after she had seen Hal passing down the road, had still chained her at that upper window peering out into the darkening storm, had all at once given place to action.

What strategies she had had to employ to escape from the house! What a battle with the tempest she had fought, with wind and rain tearing at her long coat, the pocket of which had held the flashlight! Ay, and that battle had been only a skirmish compared to the launching of a dory, the mad struggle through the surf. All thought of danger flung to the wings of heaven, all fear of Hal abandoned, and of losing her good name in case of being seen by any one, so she had battled her way to him—to warn him, to save him.

Laura, suddenly grown calm with that heroic resolution which inspires every true woman in the moment of need, let the boy’s head fall back and mustered her thoughts. She realized the essential thing was go for help, at once. Strong as she was, and nerved with desperation, she knew the task of dragging Hal up the companionway, of getting him into her dory, of carrying him ashore in the gale-beaten surf surpassed her powers.

So she must leave him, even though he should die alone there.

But, first, she could at least give him some aid. She peered about her, flicking the electric beam over the trampled confusion. What could she use for bandages? A smashed suit-case yawned wide, its contents slewed about. She caught up a shirt, tore it into broad strips and, laying the flashlight in the berth, bent to her work.

“Oh, God!” she whispered, as she laid bare the wound; but though she felt giddy, she kept on. The sagging dead weight of Hal’s body almost overbore her strength. She held it up, however, and very tightly bound him, up around the massive neck, over the back, across the high-arched, muscular chest. She knotted her bandages, and let Hal sink down again.

Then she smoothed back his drabbled hair. She bent and kissed him; snatched the light, turned and fled up the companion, clambered down into the dory, and cast loose.

All the strength of her young arms had to strain their uttermost. Passionately she labored. The wounded man no longer was the brute who had so cruelly sought to wrong her. He was no longer the untamed savage, the bully, the thief. No, in his helplessness he had gone swiftly back to the boy she had known and loved—just Hal, her boy.

The storm-devils, snatching at her, seemed incarnate things that fought her for his life. The wind that drove her away from the shingle-beach and toward the rocks below Jim Gordon’s store, the lathering crests that spewed their cold surges into the dory as it heaved high and swung far down, seemed shouting: “Death to Hal!”

Laura, her hair down and flying wild, pulled till wrists and arms seemed breaking. For a few minutes she thought herself lost; but presently, when breath and strength were at the ragged edge, she began to hear the loud, rattling clamor of pebbles on the shingle. A breaker caught the dory, flung it half round, upset it. Into the water, strangling, struggling, Laura plunged. The backwash caught her, tugged at her. She found footing, lost it, fell and choked a cry in cold brine.

The next breaker heaved her up. She crawled through wrack and weed, over jagged stones, and fell exhausted on a sodden windrow of drift.

For a minute she could move no further, but had to lie under the pelting rain, with the dark hands of ocean clutching to drag her back. But presently a little strength revived. She crawled forward once more, staggered to her feet, and, falling, getting up again, won to the top of the dune.

Off to her left, dim through the shouting night, the vague light-blurs of old man Gordon’s windows were fronting the tempest. The girl struggled forward, sobbing for breath. Not all the fury of the North Atlantic, flung against that shore, had turned her from her task.

Astonished beyond words, the lobstermen and fishers eyed her with blank faces as she burst in the door. Under the light of tin reflectors, quids remained unchewed, pipes unsmoked. Bearded jaws fell. Eyes blinked.

The girl’s wet, draggled hair, her bloodless face and burning eyes stunned them all.

“Quick, quick!” she implored. “Hal Briggs—”

“What’s he done now, girl?” cried old Sy Whittaker, starting up. “He ain’t hurt you, has he? If he has—”

“He’s been stabbed, aboard the Kittiwink! He’s bleeding to death there!”

Chairs scraped. Excitement blazed.

“What’s that, Laura?” cried Gordon. “Stabbed? Who done it?”

“Oh, no matter—go, quick—go, go!”

“Damn funny!” growled a voice from behind the stove. “Gal goin’ aboard night like this, an’ him stabbed. Looks mighty bad!”

“You’ll look a damn sight wuss if you say that agin, or anythin’ like it!” shouted the old storekeeper with doubled fist. “Hal Briggs ain’t worryin’ me none, but this here is Laura, old man Maynard’s gal, an’ by the Jeeruzlem nobody ain’t goin’ to say nothin’ about her! Tell me, gal,” he added, “is he hurt bad?”

She caught him by the arm. He had to hold her up.

“Dying, Jim! Bleeding to death! Oh, for the love of God—hurry, hurry!”

Around them the rough, bearded men jostled in pea-coats, slickers, sou’westers. The tin reflectors struck harsh lights and shadows from rugged faces of astonishment.

“Who could o’ done it?” began Shorrocks, the blacksmith. “They’d oughta be ketched, an’—”

“Never you mind about that!” cried Gordon. He caught from a nail a formless old felt hat and jammed it on his head; he snatched up a lighted lantern standing on the counter, and with a hobnailed clatter ran for the door.

“Everybody out!” he bellowed. “Everybody out now, to help Laura!”

Into the storm he flung himself. All hands cascaded toward the door.

“You stay here, gal!” advised Asahel Calkins, lobsterman. “Ain’t no night fer you!”

“I can’t stay! Let me go, too!” she pleaded. They made way for her. With the men she ran. Two or three others had lanterns, but these made no more than tiny dancing blurs of light in the drenching dark. Along a path, then into the field and up to the storm-scourged dune they stumbled, pantingly, bucking the gale. The lanterns set giant legs of shadows striding up against the curtain of the rain-drive, as the men pressed onward. Snapping, Laura’s skirts flailed.

Over the dune they charged, and scuffled down to the dories. Disjointed words, cries, commands whipped away. Strong hands hustled a dory down. Laura was clambering in already, but Jim Gordon pulled her back.

“No, gal, no!” he ordered sternly. His voice flared on the wind as he shoved her into the arms of Shorrocks. “You, Henry, look out for her. Don’t let her do nothin’ foolish!”

He set his lantern in the dory, impressed Calkins and another into his service, and scrambled aboard. A dozen hands ran the dory out through the first breakers. Oars caught; and as the men came up the beach, dripping in the vague lantern-light, the dory pulled away.

To Laura, waiting with distracted fear among the fishermen, it seemed an hour; yet at the most hardly fifteen minutes had passed before the little boat came leaping shoreward in white smothers. Out jumped Gordon. Laura ran to him, knee-deep in a breaker.

“Is he—dead?” she shivered, with clacking teeth.

“Nope. Ain’t much time to lose, though, an’ that’s a fact. He’s cut some, looks like! Goddy mighty, but there must o’ been some fight out there!”

He turned to the dory. With others, he lifted out a heavy body, wrapped in sailcloth, horribly suggestive of a burial at sea. Laura gripped her hands together for self-mastery.

“Oh, hurry, hurry!” she entreated.

“We’ll do all we kin, gal,” some one answered, “but we ain’t no real amb’lance-corpse. It’s goin’ to be a slow job, gittin’ him home.”

“Here, Laura, you carry a lantern an’ go ahead, ’cross the field,” commanded Gordon, with deep wisdom. Only to give her something to do, something to occupy her mind, was kindness of the deepest. Into her hand old Calkins thrust a lantern.

“All ready!” cried he. “H’ist anchor, an’ away!”

Seven or eight men got hold, round the edges of the sailcloth, and so, swinging the inert Hal as in a cradle, they stumbled to the road, with Laura going on ahead.

To the right they turned, toward Snug Haven. Now Laura walked beside them. Once in a while she looked at the white face half seen in its white cradle, now beginning to be mottled with crimson stains.

But she said no other word. Strong with the calm that had reasserted itself, she walked that night road of storm and agony.

Thus was Hal Briggs borne back to his grandfather’s house.

In the cabin at Snug Haven old Captain Briggs—having finished his letter to Hal and put that, too, in the safe—had now come to the last task of all, the sacrifice that, so he faithfully believed, was to remove the curse of Dengan Jouga from his boy.

A strange lassitude weighed down upon the old man, the weariness that comes when a long journey is almost done and the lights of home begin to shine out through “the evening dews and damps.” The captain felt that he had come at last to journey’s end. He sat there at his desk, eying the revolver, a sturdy, resolute figure; an heroic figure, unflinchingly determined; a figure ennobled by impending sacrifice, thoughtful, quiet, strong. His face, that had been lined with grief, had grown quite calm. The light upon it seemed less from his old-time cabin-lamp than from some inner flame. With a new kind of happiness, more blessed than any he had ever known, he smiled.

“Thank God!” he murmured, with devout earnestness. “It won’t be long now afore I’m with the others that have waited for me all this time up there on Croft Hill. I’m glad to go. It isn’t everybody than can save the person they love best of anything in the world, by dying. I thought God was hard with me, but after all I find He’s very good. He’ll understand. He’d ought to know, Himself, what dying means to save something that must be saved!”

Once more he looked at Hal’s picture. Earnestly and simply, he kissed it. Then he laid it on the desk again.

“Good-by,” said he. “Maybe you won’t ever understand. Maybe you’ll blame me. Lots will. I’ll be called a coward. You’ll have to bear some burden on account of me, but this is the only way.”

His expression reflected the calm happiness which comes with realization that to die for one beloved is a better and more blessÈd thing than life. Never had old Captain Briggs felt such joy. Not only was he opening the ways of life to Hal, but he was cleansing his own soul. And all at once he felt the horror of this brooding curse was lifting—this curse which, during fifty years, had been reaching out from the dark and violent past.

He breathed deeply and picked up the revolver.

“God, Thou art very good to me,” he said quietly. “I couldn’t understand the way till it was shown me. But now I understand.”

Toward his berth he turned, to lie down there for the last time. As he advanced toward it he became vaguely conscious of some confusion outside. A sound of voices, gusty and faint through the wind, reached him. These came nearer, grew louder.

Listening, he paused, with a frown. Of a sudden, feet clumped on the front steps. Heavily they thudded across the porch. And with sharp insistence his electric door-bell trilled its musical brrr!

“What’s that, now?” said the captain. Premonitions of evil pierced his heart. As he hesitated, not knowing what to do, the front door boomed with the thudding of stout fists. A heavy boot kicked the panels. A voice bawled hoarsely:

“Briggs! Ahoy, there, cap’n! Let us in! Fer God’s sake, let us in!”