Chapter III

When Peter Newhall was hurled into that awful sea he had no shadow of a dream but that this was his last conscious instant. There was no battling those mountainous waves, and the jagged edges of the cruel rocks would destroy him in a moment. Yet, as always in the last degree of crisis, the instant was one of marvelous clarity of thought.

Not merely the physical body strengthens and gathers reserve power in a crisis. The mental powers are likewise enhanced, encompassing a whole world in one glance, the breadth of many years in an instant. “It’s the end,” Peter told himself in one flash of blinding light. He did not even deign to hope but that those black waters would smother his existence; that in an instant it would be as if he had never been, his fear of the law instantly removed, his freedom gained, his crime of the year before wiped from the slate. He knew no particular regrets so far as he himself was concerned. In that instant of far vision he felt it was for the best.

In that instant he thought of Dorothy. Her image was just as plain, just as vivid in that eerie gray dawn as if he had just left her side. Her beauty swept him with its old, moving power; her merry eyes that were sometimes so dark and strange, her dusky skin with its dull, red glow, the long curves of her lithe form, and the remembered miracle of her kisses transfigured him now. There was no sequence to these thoughts. They came in one flash. The enchanted hours that he had spent with her passed in instantaneous review before him,—those hours before Ivan had ever appeared with his heavenly music, before the world had come to be too much with him and with her, the wife at his side. In that terrible instant his heart cried out to her as it had never done in the fullness of their happiness. She was his own, his wife, the woman that God had given him, and he wanted her beyond any reach of words or thought.

One smile from her would redeem him now and save him from the terror of these icy waters that had even now seized upon him and were battering him senseless against the crags. In this he was as a child; yet the terror was not so great that it could blind him to the fact that he was leaving her alone and unprotected in a world whose trials had proven too much for him. There was an abiding quality of strength in him yet—for all these last months of debauchery—and his last impulse was in prayer for her. He wanted her destiny to be serene; his last breath of vivid consciousness before he felt the first, shattering impact of his body against the crags was given to her, wholly and without reservation. He wanted the world to be kind to the girl who had sheltered in his arms.

He did not pray for himself. He had not yet gathered wisdom to know that even these mountainous waves were not too mighty to be stilled by prayer. If he himself had dwelt in his own thoughts at all, it was only that when the time was ripe and his wanderings were done he could come back to her, if only in the night and on the wind.

The first blow against the crags almost knocked him unconscious; thereafter the struggle in that tempestuous sea was like a gray dream. Indeed, the grayness of dawn lay over the waters, dim against the dark, spray-wet crags; he was aware of its presence in some strange, vague under-consciousness that the horror of impending death could not ruffle or disturb. The waves caught him again, held him up, then like a wild beast hurled him head-first toward the jagged rocks.

Instinctively he threshed about in the water to save the killing impact on his head, but he was only partially able to break the force of the blow. The knife edge of the crag sliced down across his face, gouging and tearing as it went, and through the inner passages to his ears he heard his jawbone crack apart. Again the waves caught him, lifting him high, and again he was sped forward swift as a dolphin dashing through green water.

The force of this wave was too mighty to resist. His momentum was such, the pressure of the water so great behind him, that he was paralyzed and helpless in an instant. Half-conscious, he waited for the shattering blow that would mean the end.

But it did not come. The wave spent itself; then, as it rolled back, dropped him on gray, smooth rocks that were lifted above the water. In that dim instant he saw the gray line of the shore not a hundred feet beyond.

The waves had carried him, as if by miracle, through a gap in the reefs. Instantly a fighting spirit welled back in him: if he could hold on, keep consciousness a moment more, he might easily be washed ashore. It was merely the primitive instinct to survive that commanded him now: the will to live and cool, human intelligence were both lost to him with the broader aspects of his consciousness. He was bleeding, horribly mutilated; yet he began to fight like a tiger in a trap.

The waves caught him again, lifted him up, and he fought hard against them to avoid the full power of the shattering blow when they laid him down. He was fifty feet nearer now, and as the wave went out, he struggled ahead to avoid being inundated by the next wave. And almost at once he was staggering on the shore, saved as if by miracle, in the icy, brightening dawn.

From that moment he had no doubt of his continued life. He knew perfectly that this was a wild, uninhabited land and that a few moments of exposure to the cold would end his life certainly as a hangman’s noose; yet the miracle that had brought him through the reefs would not stop here. He had not been saved from the cruel fangs of the rocks to perish miserably from exposure on the shore; the destiny that had spared him would also find means to shelter him. His injuries were serious, but they would not be fatal if any help at all could be found, and without help he would perish anyway from the cold.

Still in his half-dream he shook the salt water from his eyes and looked about him. It did not surprise him that a ship should be lying just without the reefs, tugging at her strong, anchor chain, or that closer view should reveal a stout dory manned with a full crew that had evidently been launched in an attempt to rescue drowning men. At first no reasonable explanation for her presence occurred to him: it was simply part of the miracle that had borne him alive through the reefs. Yet in a moment he had guessed the truth: that this was a wandering trader who had answered the same appeal for help that had sped the _Jupiter_ to her destruction.

The ship they had come to save was beyond the reach of help. She was a small, auxiliary schooner; the dawn showed part of her stern and her broken, floating masts where she had gone down. Of the _Jupiter_ there was nothing whatever to be seen. The dory, in instant danger of being overwhelmed, rode just outside a wide gap in the reefs and a quarter of a mile below, holding such a position that she would strike the sloping beach, rather than the rocks, in case she was blown into shore. There were no other survivors on the length of the beach that his eyes could span.

He did not believe his rescue could be accomplished for some moments at least, so he took the only possible course to keep the blood moving in his veins,—he got to his feet and struggled up and down the shore. The fact that the exercise caused a more active flow from his wounds could not be taken into consideration; it was better to risk death from loss of blood than to die swiftly and surely from freezing. But already the men in the dory had seen him and were trying to push into the little cove between the reefs. Still he ran back and forth, only half-conscious.

* * * * *

Blond, rugged men had gathered about him and were ministering to him when the last of his dim consciousness departed. He had no shadow of remembrance of being borne to the dory, rowed out to the ship, and hoisted aboard; but the strong, rugged engine of his life wakened him to sharp realization of a certain, ghastly business transpiring in the cabin. When he opened his eyes he was on a clean bunk, and a little group of men—none of whom he could ever remember seeing before—were working about him.

It took some little time to tell what they were doing. One of them, he guessed presently, was acting as ship’s doctor: his hands were scrubbed till the skin was pink, he wore a white apron, and his look was very businesslike. He was talking quietly with two of the ship’s officers as he sterilized a set of villainous-looking surgeon’s tools.

Their conversation drifted faintly to Peter’s ears. “Dis is quite a fe’der in your cap, Bill,” one of the sailors was saying in the good-humored, subdued voice that is the peculiar characteristic of a certain great breed of seafarers. Peter did not have to glance at the blond head or the blue eyes of the speaker to know his race; his accent and his voice revealed it plainly. There is an old saying, at sea, that anywhere in the world a man may roam he can still find three familiar things: one of them is a sea gull and the second a Norwegian sailor, but the third one must go to sea to learn. The first two, at least, held good here: he guessed at once that three-fourths of the crew, if not all, were Norwegians; and the ship was not yet so far out to sea but that the gulls cried plaintively in her wake.

“I know it’s a pretty big job for my skill,” Bill answered promptly. “If there was a real M. D. on the boat or within a thousand miles I wouldn’t tackle it—though I’ve tackled some pretty stiff jobs, and got away with ’em, too, my years at sea. If I don’t work on that face he’ll be a monster to look at the rest of his life. I really think I can help him—I believe if he was conscious he’d tell me to go ahead.”

Peter opened his eyes again, and one glance at the intelligent face, the strong, capable, well-scrubbed hands, restored his confidence. “I’m conscious,” he said thickly. His jaw wobbled as he tried to enunciate. “Go ahead.”

The sailors looked at him with no great amazement. “That’s another complication—that you’re conscious,” Bill returned. “We haven’t any anesthetic.”

“Go ahead, anyway. My face hasn’t any feeling in it, at all. It feels numb.”

“I’m afraid it won’t be numb when I get to work on it. But we’re a thousand miles from a real surgeon, and you’ve got to have help. I’ll be as easy as I can.”

Bill went to work,—to the absolute limit of his skill. He stitched great, ugly cuts, he bandaged loose, torn strips of flesh, he tied bleeding veins, he fastened again—with some deftness—a torn eyelid that was the result of a long cut that passed diagonally across his face and which had broken the bone of the nose, and he tried his best to set the broken jaw. Through it all Peter clenched his hands, bit the wedge that Bill had placed between his jaws, and said nothing. He had learned, in the North, that there are many things of less wisdom than silence. This is one of the teachings of the waste places.

His torn nerves sustained him until the end, until the last wound was washed and repaired to the best of Bill’s ability. Because he dropped immediately to sleep thereafter he did not hear the terse compliment that Bill paid him,—blunt words that would have pleased him more than any specious flattery in the days of his glory.

“The boy’s got guts,” Bill had said with emphasis.

Stabbing, burning pain in his jaws and face woke Peter late in the night; and he was somewhat surprised to find Bill sitting at his bed-side. “Don’t try to talk,” the latter cautioned quickly. “I don’t think you can if you tried, with that bandage around your jaw. You won’t do any talking for some weeks, my boy. But I can see you’re better.”

Peter managed to grin wanly and moved his hand as if in the act of writing. Bill understood promptly.

“I’ll get you a piece of paper in a minute. It’s lucky for you you know how to read and write. I’ve got to look at some of those bandages first, though.” He slipped off some of the stained white strips, sterilized the wounds, and put on fresh bandages. “Just doing fine, so far,” he gloated with professional pride. “Those fancy army surgeons couldn’t do prettier work than that on a messed-up human face. You won’t look like you, but you’ll look like something. You wanted a piece of paper? Wait a second.”

He laid the back of an envelope on the rail of the bunk and put a pencil in Peter’s hand. The latter wrote simply like the seafaring man he was coming to be.

“‘What ship and where bound?’” Bill read aloud. “Naturally, you would be interested in that. This is the auxiliary schooner _Dolly Bettis_, sailed from Naknek for Siberia. But don’t worry—we’ll be back to Unalaska in six months, and from there to ’Frisco. I hope you haven’t got any pressing engagements.”

Peter grinned in his bandages, and at the cost of some pain shook his head.

“Good. Don’t want to be put off if we meet any one?”

The castaway indicated “no” again.

“Then we’ll be shipmates for some time. The captain’ll be glad to sign you up; though you haven’t the hands of a seafaring man, there’s always something you can do. What do they call you?”

Peter took the paper again and started to write Peter Neville, the name he had gone under—the few times he had had occasion to give his name—during his residence in the native village. But he halted before he had completed the first word. A sudden, deeply moving thought flashed like a light in his mind.

He was hardly aware that Bill had picked up the paper. “Pete, eh,” he read. He had no idea but that the man had written all he had intended to write, and was not in the least surprised. Many men, in this remote end of the North, go by first names only; and it is not considered the best manners to inquire too closely as to what the family name might be. They were man to man, and Bill had no desire to embarrass his friend. He seemed perfectly matter-of-fact and grinned in a friendly way. “Limejuice Pete!”

Limejuice Pete! Bill went out and left this Southern aristocrat to ponder on the interesting situation in which he found himself.