Chapter XIV: The Passing of Black Gull

That night as the hours of slumber approached Ruth lay on her bed looking out toward the bay. The night was hot and sultry. A lazy warm breeze from the land waved the thin curtains in a ghostlike fashion. There was no need for covers, so she lay there allowing the breeze to fan her toes. Half awake, half asleep, she mused and dreamed of many things.

The night was dark, the sky overcast. Neither moon nor stars shone through. The scene before her, save for a wavering light here and there, was black. “Like a beautiful picture suddenly wiped out by the swing of a broad, black brush,” she told herself.

Still there were the lights. One might imagine them to be anything. In her fancy she told herself that the red light, very high above the water, was hung on the mast of the old wood hauling schooner.

“And her hold is packed full of valuable silks,” she told herself. It was easy to dream on such a night. One might imagine anything and believe it.

She stared away toward old Fort Skammel. A light flared over there. “They’re carrying the silks from that hot little underground room,” she told herself, and at once became quite excited about it.

“Should have gone over there this very day,” she mused.

But no, the light vanished. It showed no more. “Couldn’t load all that in the dark. To-morrow,” she said. There was an air of finality in her tone.

She tried to see the ancient schooner, _Black Gull_. Too dark for that. She could imagine it all the same. She could see her swinging there at anchor, a dark, brooding giant, whispering of the past, telling of glorious old State of Maine days, that were gone forever.

“I love you, love you, love you,” the girl whispered as if the dark old ship were a person, a gallant knight of her dreams.

At that, leaning back on her pillow, one brown hand beneath her head, she fell asleep.

Just how long she slept she may never know. Enough that she suddenly found herself sitting up wide awake and staring out at the bay that was all aglow with a strange, lurid, unearthly light.

“It’s the end of the world,” she told herself and wondered at her own calmness.

“It’s Portland Harbor. It’s on fire, burning up!” came a little more excitedly as she found herself more truly awake.

It was only as she sprang to her feet and stood there in the window with her dream robes blowing about her that she realized the full and terrible truth.

Then she covered her eyes with her hands as she sank to the bed with a sharp cry.

“_Black Gull_, you are on fire. You are burning up!”

And there she had at last the solemn truth. At once her mind was in a whirl. How had it happened? She recalled the curious visit she and Betty had made there in the night and of the remarkable pirate band that had come to join them. Had these men returned? Had a match carelessly dropped, a stove overheated, brought the great catastrophe?

What could be done? Nothing. There was no fireboat. No pipe line could reach her. _Black Gull_ was doomed.

In a state of suppressed excitement that held her nerves at the bursting point, she sat there watching a spectacle such as is the lot of few to see.

At first the blaze, flaming fiercely, fanned by the off shore breeze, went raging out to sea. But at last, all at once, as if awed by this sublime spectacle, the death of a great ship, the wind dropped and the blaze, like flames of some gigantic candle, rose up—up—up until it seemed to the watching girl that they must reach the sky and set the planets, the stars, the very universe aflame.

As she sat there, lips apart, pupils dilated, motionless, watching, the spectacle became a thing of many dreams. Now the flames were but the burning of a stupendous campfire, the dark bulk that stood half concealed, half revealed, docks, lighthouses, islands, were figures of reposing and crouching giants.

Then the flames became a ladder of fire. Down this ladder, a thousand angels, whose wings could not be touched by fire, swarmed.

The ship burned with a clear, red flame now. The water about her became a pool of red and old rose. At the edge of this pool small bulks moved, motor boats, row boats, launches.

“What can they do?” she murmured. “Nothing. Let them go to bed. They are like hunting hounds, in at the death.”

She wondered vaguely if the person responsible for this catastrophe were circling there, too. Strangely enough, she fancied she could pick the man, a dark-faced foreigner with a shock of black hair.

“The face-in-the-fire,” she thought.

For a moment she thought of dressing, of launching her punt and going on a still hunt for the man. In the end, she sat there watching to the end the death of much that was dear to her.

The end came with a suddenness that was startling. The masts had fallen, one at a time. Slowly, regularly, like seamen dropping from a ladder into a dory, they fell to send sparks shooting skyward. Then, with a thunder that was deafening, there came the shock of a terrific explosion.

For a space of seconds all the fire at the center of the earth seemed to be shooting skyward. Then darkness and silence, such as the girl had never known, settled over all.

Only the sea spoke. With a wild rushing breath it whispered of wind and storms, of treachery and death. Three times its whisper came loudly from the sandy beach. Then softly, it repeated its message until it died to nothing, and a breeze springing up from nowhere caught it up and carried it out to sea.

Springing to her feet, her arms flung wide, the girl stood there for a full moment. Rigid, silent, she was swearing vengeance on the destroyers of _Black Gull_.

Dropping to her place, again she scanned the sea. One by one, like death candles, lights were appearing. Here one, there one, they formed at last the flaming outline of a ship’s deck. All had been burned or blown away but the stout hull that for so many years had done battle with the waves. For an hour these burned brightly. Then, one by one they blinked out. The tide was rising. The sea had come to the rescue. It was extinguishing the fire. On the morrow the black skeleton of a gallant ship would show there above the restless waves.

“Gone!” she all but sobbed as she buried her face in the pillow. “_Black Gull_ is gone forever.”