  Half a thousand men gave chase; but the assailant had escaped to the common shelter of the coasting town. He had taken to the water. It was now quite dark; clouds had gathered; the wind had risen suddenly; thunder was heard. A fierce gust tore the dust of Angel Alley, and hurled it after the fleeing criminal; as if even the earth that he trod rejected him. In this blinding and suffocating whirlwind the pursuers stumbled over each other, and ran at haphazard. The police swept every skulking-place, dividing their forces between the Alley and the docks. But their man, who was shrewd enough, had evaded them; it was clear that he had marked out an intelligent map of escape, and had been able to follow it. The baffled police, thinking at least to pacify the angry people behind them, kept up that appearance of energy, with that absence of expectation, for which their race is distinguished. An officer who was stealthily studying the docks far to the westward, and alone, suddenly stopped. A cry for help reached him; and it was a woman’s cry. The voice kept up an interrupted iteration:— “Police! Help!—Murder! Sergeant!—Help! Help!” as if choked off, or strangled in the intervals. The sergeant, following the sound as well as he could, leaped down the long, empty wharf from whose direction the cry seemed to come, and peered over the slimy edge. The storm was passing noisily up the sky, and the darkness was of the deepest. Out of its hollow a girl’s voice uprose:— “Sergeant! Sergeant! He’s drowning me! But I’ve got him!” and bubbled away into silence. At that moment there was lightning; and the outlines of two figures struggling in the water could be distinctly seen. These two persons were Lena and Ben Trawl. They seemed to have each other in a mutual death-grip. The girl’s hands were at the man’s throat. He dashed her under and under the water. But her clutch did not relax by a finger. He held her down. But Lena held on. “After I’ve strangled you!” gasped Lena. “—— you,” muttered the man. “Drown, then!” Her head went under; her mouth filled; this time she could not struggle up; her ears rang; her brain burst. But the little fingers on the big throat clutched on. Then she felt herself caught from above—air came, and breath with it—and Ben swore faintly. “Undo your hands, Lena,” said the sergeant. Another flash of lightning revealed the sea and sky, the docks and the officers, and Ben, purple and breathing hard, stretched upon the wharf. Lena heard the snap of the handcuffs upon his wrists; and then she heard and saw no more. The sergeant touched the girl’s dripping and unconscious figure with a respect never shown to Lena in Windover police circles before. “She might not come to, yet,” he said; “she’s nigh enough to a drowned girl. Get a woman, can’t you, somebody?” “The man’s all we can manage,” replied a brother officer. “Get him to the station the back way—here! Give a hand there! Quick! We’ll have lynch-law here in just about ten minutes, if you ain’t spry. Hark! D’ye hear that?” A muffled roar came down the throat of Angel Alley. It grew, and approached. It was the cry of all Windover raging to avenge the Christian hero whom it learned, too late, to honor. “Anyhow, he’ll hang for it,” muttered Lena, when she came to herself in her decent room. Johnny’s mother was moaning over her. Lena pushed the old woman gently away, and commanded the retreating officer, “Say, won’t he? Out with it!” “Well,” replied the officer in a comfortable tone, “Let ’em swear,” said Lena. “I see him do it. I saw him heave the stone.” “That might alter the case, and again it mightn’t,” replied the officer; “it would depend on the value of the testimony—previous reputation, and so on.” Lena groaned. “But I caught him by the arm! I stood alongside of him. I was watching for it. I thought I’d be able to stop him. I’m pretty strong. I grabbed him—but he flung me off and stamped on me. I see him heave the rock. See! There’s the mark, where he kicked me. Then he ran, and I after him. I can swear to it before earth and heaven. I see him fling that rock!” “You see,” observed the officer, “it ain’t a case of manslaughter just yet. The minister was breathing when they moved him.” They carried him to his own rooms, for it was not thought possible to move him further. He had not spoken nor stirred, but his pulse indicated that a good reserve of life remained in him. The wound was in the lung. The stone was a large and jagged one, with a cruel edge. It had struck with malignant power, and by one of those extraordinary aims which seem to be left for hate and chance to achieve. His wife had caught him as he fell. She had uttered one cry; after that, her lips had opened only once, and only to say that she assented to her Oddly, the only quite coherent thought she had was of a man she had heard about, a carpenter, who fell from a staging on the other side of the Cape. He was put into an express cart and driven home, a seven-mile gallop, over the rudest road in the State, to his wife; naturally, he was dead when he got there. Bayard had been called to see the widow. Captain Hap stepped up (on tiptoe, as if he had been in a sick-room), and whispered to the surgeon who had been summoned to Angel Alley. “That will do,” said the surgeon; “it has never been tried, that I know of, but it is worth trying—most modern ideas are—if practicable.” “The fishermen hev cleared the car, the company has cleared the track, and the motor man is one of his people,” said Captain Hap; “an’ there’s enough of us to carry him from here to heaven so—so lovin’ly he’d never feel a jolt.” The old captain made no effort to wipe the tears which rained down his wrinkled cheeks. He and Job Slip, with Mr. Bond and Bob and Tony, took hold of the stretcher; they looked about, to choose, out of a hundred volunteers, the sixth strong hand. The Reverend George Fenton, agitated and trembling, “I have never lifted a hand to help him since I came to Windover,” cried Fenton in the voice of a man who would rather that the whole world heard what he said and knew how he felt. “Let me have this chance before it is too late!... I’m not worthy to touch his bier,” added Fenton brokenly. They gave way to his pleading, and it was done as he asked. Thus the wounded man was carried gently to the electric car—“the people’s carriage.” The fishermen, as the captain said, had captured it; they stood with bowed heads, as the stretcher passed through them, like children, sobbing. Throngs of them followed the slowly moving car, which carried Bayard tenderly to his own door. It was said afterwards that scores of them watched all night outside the cottage, peering for some sign of how it fared with him; but they were so still that one might hardly tell their figures from the shadows of the night. The wind had continued to rise, but the thunder had passed on, and the shower was almost over when Bayard’s bearers lifted him across the threshold of Mrs. Granite’s door. At that moment one belated flash ran over earth and sea and sky. It was a red flash, and a mighty one. By its crimson light the fishermen saw his face for that last instant; it lay turned over on the stretcher The flash went out, and darkness fell again. “Then God shut the door,” muttered an old and religious fisherman who stood weeping by the fence, among the larkspurs. The wind went down, and the tide went out. Bayard’s pulse and breath fell with the sea, and the June dawn came. The tide came in, and the wind arose, and it was evening. Then he moaned, and turned, and it was made out that he tried to say, “Helen?—was Helen hurt?” Then the soul came into his eyes, and they saw her. He did not sink away that day, nor the next, and the evening and the morning were the third day in the chamber where death and life made duel for him. He suffered, it is hard to think how much; but the fine courage in his habit of living clung on. The injury was not, necessarily, a fatal one. The great consulting surgeon called from Boston said. “The patient may live.” He added: “But the vitality is low; it has been sapped to the roots. And the lung is weak. There has been a strain sometime; the organ has received a lesion.” Then Job Slip, when he heard this, thought of In all those days (they were eight in number) Jane Granite’s small, soft eyes took on a strange expression; it was not unlike that we see in a dog who is admitted to the presence of a sick or injured master. God was merciful to Jane. The pastor had come back. To live or to die, he had come. It was hers again to work, to watch, to run, to slave for him; she looked at the new wife without a pang of envy; she came or went under Helen’s orders; she poured out her heart in that last torrent of self-forgetful service, and thanked God for the precious chance, and asked no more. She had the spaniel suffering, but she had the spaniel happiness. For seven days and nights he lay in his shabby rooms, a royal sufferer. The Christ above his bed looked down with solemn tenderness; in his moments of consciousness (but these were few) he glanced at the picture. Helen had not left his room, either day or night. Leaning upon one arm on the edge of the narrow bed, she watched for the lifting of an eyelid, for the motion of a hand, for the ebbing or the rising But he could not talk. She found herself already anticipating the habit of those whom the eternal silence bereaves, recalling every precious phrase that his lips had uttered in those last days; she repeated to herself the words which he had said to her on Sunday morning,— “Nothing can harm us now, for you are mine, and I am yours, and this is forever.” As the seventh day broke he grew perceptibly stronger. Helen yielded to her father’s entreaties, and for a moment absented herself from the sick-room—for she was greatly overworn,—to drink a breath of morning air. She sat down on the step in the front door of the cottage. She noticed the larkspur in the garden, blue and tall; bees were humming through it; the sound of the tide came up loudly; Jane Granite came and offered her something, she could not have said what; Helen tried to drink it, but pushed the cup away, and went hurriedly upstairs again. A cot had now been moved in for her beside Bayard’s narrow bed. She sat down on the edge of it, between her father and her husband. The Professor stirred to step softly out. “Dear Professor!” said Bayard suddenly. He looked at the Christ on the wall, and smiled. Then he put his hand in his wife’s, and slept. It came on to be the evening of the eighth day. He had grown stronger all the day, but he suffered much. “Folks are keepin’ of him back by their prayers,” said the religious, old fisherman, who leaned every day upon the garden fence. “He can’t pass.” But Job Slip and Captain Hap, who sat upon the doorsteps, listening from dawn to dark for any sign from Bayard’s room, said nothing at all. It came to be evening, and the tide had risen with the wind. The sea called all night long. Helen sat alone with her husband. He did not wander that night, but watched her face whenever he was not asleep. “Kiss me, Helen,” he sighed at midnight. She stooped and kissed him, but her lips took the air from him, and he struggled for it. “You poor, poor girl!” he said. The wind went down, and the tide went out. The dawn came with the ebb. Bayard fell into a sleep so gentle that Helen’s heart leaped with hope. She stole out into the study. Captain Hap was there; his shoes were off; he stepped without noise. The sunrise made a rose-light in the rooms. “It is real sleep,” breathed Helen. “Don’t wake him, Captain.” But when the old sailor-nurse would have taken her place for the morning watch, she shook her “It shall not happen again,” she thought. Then exhaustion and vigil overcame her, for she had watched for many nights; and thinking that she waked, she slept. When she came to herself it was broad, bright day. Her hand had a strange feeling; when she tried, she could not move it, for he held it fast. There were people in the room,—her father, her mother, Captain Hap. She stirred a little, leaning towards her husband’s pillow. “Dear, are you better this morning?” But some one came up, and gently laid a hand upon her eyes. |
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