Chapter IV

Limejuice Pete! It did not surprise Peter Newhall that Bill should take him for an Englishman. He was a pure Anglo-Saxon to start with, his features had suggested those of the better class of Britishers, but mostly Bill got the idea from his Southern accent,—an accent with which the crew of the _Dolly Bettis_ was entirely unfamiliar but which, because it was nothing else they knew, became English by the process of elimination. And it did sound something like it—changed as it had been by his broken jaw—the softening of the R’s and the drawling of the vowels. Limejuice Pete he was henceforth. Fortunately he had once taken a walking, ale-drinking tour through the British Isles, and he knew enough of the country to stand by his guns.

He wondered if he could leave Peter Newhall, the murderer of Paul Sarichef, behind him for good and all. The thought transfigured him. Could it be that, in this new guise, he could shake off his past, even his old individuality, and get a new start in the world of men?

He scrutinized his situation with the greatest care; and he soon arrived at a most interesting conclusion. There was no doubt but that he had vanished from his known world, not only the Peter Newhall whom he had been in Augusta, but the Pete Neville by which the natives had known him in the lost village of the Peninsula. The squaws would not see him again go reeling down the path between the huts. No one who knew him had seen his miraculous rescue from the beach. Except for one thing, one fatal obstacle, he might be free from the pursuing hand of the law for ever after.

It was true that he was the single survivor of the wreck of the _Jupiter_. But it was also tragically true that no one in the world of men behind him knew that he was aboard the _Jupiter_ in the first place.

If one single native had seen him board the cannery boat, the world would soon believe that Peter Neville was dead. In his shack they would find proof of his real identity, and word would go out that Peter Neville, drowned in the wreck of the _Jupiter_ was in reality Peter Newhall, and thus the law would never seek him further. The fact that his body would not be recovered would scarcely be a factor in that case: the sea but rarely gives up its dead. As it was, no living man that could give testimony knew that he had been on the _Jupiter_, and it was not likely that his disappearance would be connected up with her wreck. At least, there would always be an uncertainty—and the unhappy consequences of that uncertainty were that the law would always watch for him—half-heartedly, perhaps, but yet intently enough to destroy his peace of mind—and that he was exiled to the little-known, uncivilized ends of the world until his death.

Only the crew of the _Dolly Bettis_ knew that there was a survivor from the disaster of the reefs. In order that the whole world should be made to believe that Peter Newhall, alias Peter Neville, had gone down on the _Jupiter_ he must tell his shipmates that he, Limejuice Pete, had been aboard and was a survivor of the auxiliary schooner that had sunk among the reefs, the ship that the unfortunate _Jupiter_ had gone forth to save. No one living, so far as he knew, could contradict his story. Thus the world would believe that every one aboard the _Jupiter_ was lost, Peter Newhall of course among them.

While it was not secure, at least his situation was more favorable than ever before. He had disappeared, and none of his Alaskan acquaintances knew whence he had gone. If they thought him dead—which was at least possible—he would have a better chance to live his life safe from the hand of the law and its ever-watchful servants.

The fact gave him new heart. He was free from immediate danger of capture, and the haunting fear of arrest—the rending shock to his nervous system at every new face in the village and at every utterance of his name, and the shadow of the gallows across his path day and night—could be forgotten. He resolved to get up as soon as possible, take his place in the crew of the ship, and get what companionship he could from his shipmates. He would not pay for his passage; in the first place it might arouse suspicion of him—men of the class he was supposed to be do not pay for steamboat tickets when they can work their way—and in the second, the hard work on the deck might fill up the long days and give him some shadow of happiness. He would not take to the whisky bottle again at once. That wild, half-mad dream was ended.

His resolution to make the best of a bad situation was strengthened the first day he was allowed to come out upon the deck. It was not that he could begin pulling ropes at once. His strength was no more than that of a child; his diet of liquid and half-liquid food—strong broth, olive oil, raw eggs and canned milk—had taken him down, stripping away his spare flesh and paling his flushed cheeks. But soon he could begin to chew hardtack again. His jawbone was setting: indeed, all his wounds were healing without the least indication of dangerous complications. He was already able to talk through the lips that before had been so torn and lacerated.

He gazed down into the dark-green depths and watched the incredibly graceful flight of the petrels that followed the ship. They had an old appeal to his race,—these wastes of troubled waters. They moved and stirred the best part of him. They might strip him down, try him, sometimes torture him, but in the end the good metal would be left and the slag discarded.

Ten days thereafter he was well enough to begin his first light tasks aboard ship; and the captain signed him up. This proceeding was not without an element of humor: the Southern gentleman signed the name “Pete Limejuicer” with a flourish. The captain grinned widely, then assigned him a shift on the paint detail that is always busy on shipboard.

He soon found that cruelty and slave-driving did not exist aboard the _Dolly Bettis_, nor was it common on any modern ship commanded by white men. No mates kicked him as he went to his watch, no belaying pins smashed him to the earth, and the captain’s tone, though brusque, was ever so much more decent and polite than that of many newly made lieutenants in the army training camps. Indeed, the old man—as the sailors called him—expected nothing of him that was beyond reason. As the days passed he broke him in slowly to the harder tasks; but he was never taxed beyond his rapidly growing strength, and he took into consideration the fact that Pete’s long weeks of obvious dissipation had made serious inroads in his constitution.

His wounds healed, his jaw and the bone of his nose were sound again, and now the blond hair had begun to lengthen and mat about his lips and jowls. Because it was gradual, he did not at first realize the tremendous, incredible change in his appearance since the night of the wreck. In the first place health and decent habits had mostly eradicated the revolting signs of dissipation. His eyes were clear, no longer bloodshot and thin; the flesh of his face was firm rather than swollen and soft; he was a deep, good brown instead of pasty white, and the network of red lines at his cheek bones was no longer manifest. But this was only the beginning. His burly form had stripped down until he weighed but one hundred and sixty pounds, and now he had started to gain slowly as his muscles hardened to iron. This change alone was stupendous: he no longer gave the impression of being heavily built. Rather he looked lean, loosely hung, instead of rigid and stolid; his head and neck and back were wholly changed. And, as the months passed, there came to be other, less pronounced changes which, because they were subtle, would have gone farther to conceal his identity than any mere loss or gain in flesh,—particularly those of his carriage. His muscles were loose and he moved like a cat, with pronounced grace, and besides, he soon acquired that queer, rolling gait of a sailor that would remain with him until death. His hands—always a certain means of identification—broadened and strengthened and grew from the constant pulling and tugging at ropes; before they had half completed the cruise, they had begun to look like real seamen’s hands, calloused, blunt, weather-beaten and skin-cracked, and certainly as powerful as vises of iron.

But these changes were all minor ones compared to the complete transformation of his face. Bill’s surgical work had been a huge success as far as repairing his disfiguration, but in so doing he had completely concealed the man’s identity. He was as changed as if he wore a mask.

Before he had had a rather full, extremely youthful face. Now it was lean, the cheek bones showed, the chin was prominent, the eyes looked larger, more luminous and clear, and much more sober. New lines had come in his brow, his nose was irregular, no longer finely chiseled; his mouth no longer looked small and rather pursed but large and humorous. He was no longer handsome, not from any pronounced disfiguration, but simply because of the new set of his features and, perhaps, the presence of a few telltale scars. His hair had only been faintly touched with gray before the disaster; the last months of distress and dissipation had shot it full of silver. Finally his voice was completely changed in tone since the fracture of his jaw; it was still rich and full, and the differences were such as could not be narrated in words, yet the ear would never recognize it as Peter Newhall’s voice. Besides, he spoke more slowly than was his former custom—he was given to long silences, to careful, deliberate choice of words. There was nothing left—so far as externals went—of the man he had been.

Before that long cruise was done, he found a certain simple pleasure in the sailor’s life, in holding his place as a man among men. The hardest tasks on the boat did not appall him now. His hands were like iron, his muscles untiring. He liked the regular hours, the plain, abundant food, the hours of easy speech with his shipmates on watch. He did not, however, intend to follow the seafarer’s life, for the simple reason that he knew it would sooner or later carry him into danger. When he returned to Alaska he would get some kind of an outdoor job at one of the canneries where he would be mostly out of touch with civilization and the law. When too much loneliness drove his fellows to the cities below he would patiently wait for their return.

The life crowned by Dorothy he had lived in the South must be resolutely shut from his mind: that was the greatest price he paid for his drink-mad crime of two years before. Yet the wind never blew from the south but that he thought of her, and sleep never came to him—no matter how hard his day of toil—but that the empty space beside him filled him with poignant longing. Her beauty was like a glorious dream to him now, remembered in all its fullness, but beyond belief that it was once his. The loveliness, the beauty, the ineffable tenderness of those early months of their marriage redeemed and glorified him yet, lost as he was in these wastes of foam-crested waters, under this empty sky.

The boat touched at Unalaska on the return trip, but because the ends of the earth fore-gathered here—because it was the meeting place for the wayfarers that came and passed through this empty, far-off edge of the East—he wisely decided to stay on board. But he would not continue on down to San Francisco, and thus into the toils of the law. The captain had agreed to put him off at one of the native villages, farther down the Peninsula.

Two days’ sail from Unalaska a broken part forced the _Dolly Bettis_ into a little settlement in the Shumagin Islands; and when the ship had fastened to the dock for repairs Pete found, to his consternation, that he was in Squaw Harbor, instantly remembered as the home port of the _Jupiter_. For the moment he was shaken with fear. Although his old stamping ground was on the other side of the Peninsula, the fame of the Remittance Man had carried down this far; and likely there were men here who would recognize him as Peter Neville. His disappearance would be common knowledge throughout this part of Alaska; every one here would be on the lookout for him. His first instinct was to duck below and remain in hiding.

But already that chance was gone. As he turned, he ran squarely upon two men who had just encircled the pilot house; one of them was his captain, and the other Aleck Bradford, the superintendent of the cannery, and the last man on earth whom he wanted to see now. It just happened that he had got rather well acquainted with Bradford soon after his flight north: they had met in Unga; they had education and breeding in common, and Bradford had once offered him the hospitality of the little bachelor lodge he had built at the edge of the sea. It seemed inconceivable that the latter should pass him without recognition. Peter’s heart leaped as the man walked by without a glance.

But he was not safe yet. The captain was immediately behind Bradford, and he stopped Pete with an outstretched hand.

There had been few more terrifying seconds in Pete’s life. His entire nervous system was shaken to the core: he firmly believed, except for the training of nerve and muscle he had undergone in these past months at sea, he straightway would have fainted. The thought that flashed through his mind was of course that Bradford and the captain had already talked over his case, had established his identity from papers left in his cabin, and that he was under arrest.

He halted, breathless and deathly pale under his brown wind-tan and sunburn; and one glance at the captain’s face told him that he had simply been the victim of a bad conscience. The officer’s eyes were friendly: indeed he seemed less aloof, more companionable than ever before. “Come here, Aleck,” he said easily to the man in front. Bradford turned with no look other than friendly interest. “Meet Pete—Limejuice Pete to his friends. Pete, this is Mr. Bradford, of the cannery.” The manner of their introduction showed that there was a wide social gap between them—nothing that was not justified, however, by their ostensible positions in life—and Bradford’s smile and handclasp were cordial. “Pete, Mr. Bradford has the biggest run of Reds he ever had in his life in a new trap he was crafty enough to find, and he’s in need of some good labor. You were going to get off up here a ways anyhow—why don’t you ask for a job here with Mr. Bradford?”

Until this moment Peter had never realized how completely his appearance had been changed. Now, as Bradford gazed straight at him without even a hint of recognition, with no sign that this bearded sailor even recalled any one he had met, the fugitive’s self-confidence mounted like a flame. “I’d be mighty glad to work here,” he said quietly, “if Mr. Bradford can use me.”

“I can use you, all right. I’ll put you on the web-crew at the usual wages. I’ve never quite caught up with myself since I lost so many of my best men in the _Jupiter_ disaster. By the way, Cap’n, you were standing by when that happened.”

“Yes. We’d gone to help the _Vigten_—same as your boat, I guess. Pete, here, was on the _Vigten_—the single survivor. If you want to know about that wreck, ask him. Of course, we put out a boat and cruised around until there was no hope of finding any one else alive—then went on without waiting for the dead to drift ashore. We picked up Pete more or less alive on the shore, and how he got through those reefs was a miracle. We saw, just dimly in the dawn, the _Jupiter_ break up, but she was too far away for us to help. This is sure a ship’s graveyard—these hellish, Western Alaskan waters. How many men did you lose on the _Jupiter_ when she went down?”

“All aboard, as you know—six of my men, a stranger from Nushagak whose body was never recovered—his name turned out to be Larson—and that chap that used to go as Peter Neville—we called him the Remittance Man, and he lived in a native village on the other side.”

The air was breathless. It seemed beyond belief to Pete that these men would not hear the wild, drumlike beat of his heart. He shuffled his feet uneasily. “Did you find most of the bodies?” he asked, when at last he could trust himself to speak.

“About half of both crews. The Remittance Man, by the way, turned out to be quite a fellow down South—as I had always guessed. His real name was Newhall—something like that—and he’d got in a drunken brawl and killed a man—was up here hiding. He was almost cut to pieces by the crags, and they identified him by some papers found in his coat. Of course then they searched his shack and got the whole story, piece at a time. The poor devil’s lying buried over on the Bering Sea side, just about where they found the body.”

Pete’s face was white, but he held himself with an iron grip. The truth was plain enough now. He had given his coat, that night, to the big Norseman—Big Chris Larson, the men had called him—and it was Larson’s body that lay buried on the mainland opposite; it was Larson’s name instead of his own that should be inscribed on the rude headstone. The cruel crags had mutilated his body beyond recognition, but the papers in his coat pocket had given the key.

He breathed deeply as he saw the full significance of this strange, ironic prank of fate. He no longer need fear arrest, the arm of the law. The word had gone out that Peter Newhall, murderer of Paul Sarichef, was dead, and that his body lay buried on a far-off, lonely beach. No one would look for him further. His photograph, posted in many police stations, had been torn down long since. Fear of recognition there was none: even his own wife, his own mother, were she alive, would never, never recognize him in his present guise. He could go his own way now, in safety. He could begin life anew.

He realized that even if he told these men before him that he was in reality Peter Newhall, they would never believe him; they would think him insane. Even if he wanted to prove his identity it would be no easy task; he likely could not convince even his own wife except by reference to certain priceless secrets that the two of them alone knew and possibly by showing her one or two boyhood scars on his rugged hands.

Peter Newhall was of the dead. The court’s charge against him had been abrogated by death. His crime against Sarichef was already beginning to be forgotten; it had become part of the dead past. For the instant he experienced a queer, creeping doubt of his own identity!

He could go to work here, unchallenged and unsuspected. It was as if he had died and grown up again: that with his new appearance he must also gain a new personality,—not that of the wealthy son of chivalry, Peter Newhall, but that of simple Pete, a plodder and a son of toil, a man of the North. He did not, however, deceive himself for an instant into thinking that he could find happiness. Even though the man who had been Peter Newhall was alive and well to-day, the love of living was as dead as the kelp that floated on the deep. Instead of bringing Dorothy nearer, this situation only raised an impassable barrier between them—no less than the dark chasm of death itself. Except as an outsider, gazing from without, he could never go back to his homeland.

His course would be simply to fill his days with labor and to speed the night hours with sleep. He would play the game, clear to the end. It was a strange destiny; but he had no other choice.