The Pirate Story Megapack. R.M. Ballantyne

deflected backward. The light came swiftly toward him and he saw that he must make almost superhuman effort if, when it came abeam, he was to be close enough to shore to make a landing. He strove not to get into a flurry. He turned on his right side now, his left, undamaged arm driving him, while the right gave flotation, depending mostly on his legs for power.

      He was almost opposite the light, and it seemed to him that he had made scant progress shorewards for all his exertions. There comes a moment to the stoutest swimmer when the call upon the blood is too much for the over-worked lungs and heart; the limbs grow leaden, buoyancy is deflated and the overcoming of the dead centre of effort between strokes is a Herculean task. To turn upon the back and float and rest is the temptation that assails irresistibly. But to float in such an ebbing tideway, even for a few seconds, meant being carried out to the ocean, or at best down Long Island Sound.

      The light grew suddenly clearer. He had battled through the thick belt of mist that had temporarily saved him. He could see surf breaking on the rocks of Cuttyhunk. Past them he went, ledge after spouting ledge where a landing threatened broken ribs if not worse. Now he was past the light, all hope gone. A wave slapped him in the face as if derisively; salt water lapped into his mouth, open and gasping for breath. It was all over. He had failed!

      Instinctively he tensed for one last tussle before he quit. As he lifted his head to glance despairingly at the fixed light that shone so inexorably as a mark that he had missed, he saw the ghostly loom of spray that marked a little promontory projecting like a finger to the south of a tiny inlet below the ledges of the lighthouse foundation.

      Burying his head, he spent his last atoms of energy in the crawl, flailing the surges with his arms, clipping the water with his legs, plowing through the backwash from the rocks at top speed, then failing—

      There was an eddy in the tiny inlet, a small space of slack water, then an opposing current that bore him, still feebly swimming, close to the ledges that were beginning to expose their beards of slippery weed. These he grasped and clung to, twining his fingers like hooks among the pods, his body aswing and horizontal. A great wave came rolling into the inlet, chafing against a hundred obstacles, its force breaking. The tail of it lifted Jim and flung him into a crevice of the rock, scraping his flesh against mussels and barnacles that tore his feet and cut through his thin clothing, taking toll of his blood. It sucked at him as it retreated, spent, part of the general retreat of the tidal waters, but Jim remained, holding with fingers, knees, elbows and his lacerated feet, too spent to move for the moment. A rising tide must inevitably have plucked him from his refuge, borne him off to make a sport of him, half stunned as he was. But now it ebbed steadily. Off shore, the whaleboat was seeking the schooner’s searchlight in the fog, Swenson himself bewildered for direction, giving up the chase; cursing and hoping that Jim had sunk; wondering whether he had been given the right position of the island; deciding that he had been tricked, and exhausting his repertory of oaths to meet the occasion. The schooner’s engine could not buck the full sweep of the ebb any more than could the rowers. Both craft dropped down below the light, below where Jim crawled to the pitted top of his saving promontory; the boat caught up to the mother vessel, was towed, after the crew got aboard, and the schooner swung out around Martha’s Vineyard, past Nantucket, out to the sea until the tide turned.

      Jim, with naked feet, stumbled over the dripping rocks, cut and bruised, yet gathering strength in the exultation of having won through. But Nature called a halt, insisting on recuperation, his engines clamoring for fuel. A soaking meant nothing to Jim who had slept curled up on hard planks in a small cockpit many a wet night. He found a patch of sand and dropped to it, shouldering out a shallow bed, scraping a hollow for his hips, dropping asleep in the middle of the work, dreamlessly lost to all the world with the fixed white light of Cuttyhunk streaming overhead.

      Gulls woke him, screaming discordantly at this intruder on their sanctuary. The mist had gone, and the morning was sharp and clear with the sun already striking at him over Nashawena Island. He sat up, smarting and aching, a sorry looking sight but refreshed, his hurts lost in his purpose—to get to Foxfield before evening. The prospects were not encouraging, but he clenched his jaws until the muscles bunched, tightened his fists and began to figure out how he could make it. The light was out.

      The Elizabeth Islands string out westward from the elbow of the curved arm of Barnstaple—Cuttyhunk, Nashawena, Pasque, Naushon, Nonamesset and Uncatean, the two latter side by side and opposite Woods Hole, railroad terminal and port of call for steamers plying between New Bedford and Nantucket. The straits between the islands, smallest at low tide, are all narrow, that between Nashawena and Pasque the widest. There are a few shacks at Cuttyhunk settlement and at Tarpaulin Cove on Naushon, but they are irregularly occupied. Jim had faint hopes of hiring the use of a boat from one of these and making his way to the train. But it was all of fifteen miles, as an aeroplane might make it, from Cuttyhunk to Woods Hole. Even if he got a boat immediately, there was a long morning’s work ahead of him to get to the steamer landing, chancing connections at the railroad. Whether he could hire an auto at Woods Hole to take him to Foxfield he did not know. The owner would charge him both way fare, and his money might be insufficient after all. If he could get to New Bedford—

      As he stretched himself he found he had an appetite. Swenson’s sandwiches had long since lost their sustaining powers. A man’s engines need stoking to be effective. Jim made his way over the rocks toward the shacks at Cuttyhunk. He saw smoke coming out of a stovepipe, promise of breakfast. Better than that, he saw a launch, dirty-white with no glittering brasses—no pleasure craft, but the practical powerboat of a fisherman, engines hooded forward, and a roomy cockpit aft. It was moored to a wharf along which a man walked bearing lobster pots. Another one was in the cockpit fussing with the engines. Jim broke into a run, shouting at the men. The one with the lobster basket-traps turned to gaze at him and the one aboard clambered to the wharf where they stood spellbound, looking at the strange figure that had hailed them, and now came hobbling along on bare feet, hatless, with clothes torn and stained with sea-slime and sand, a right hand swollen into shapelessness, face streaked and caked with blood.

      “Wall, I’ll be scaled,” said the man with the pots. “Where in time did ye come from, stranger? W’ot’s the general idee?” Jim had his story ready.

      “Got boomed-off last night abeam the light,” he said. “Fool amateur on a yacht jibed her, running before the wind. Wish he’d sprung his stick.” The fishermen appraised him with professional eyes.

      “You bein’ hired by him?”

      “Yes, Sloop Gypsy. Me being sailing master, and my own fault for believing the fool knew enough to steer in a fog. What’ll you take for a snack to eat and a trip to New Bedford?” The men looked at each other. Their answer was essentially that of New England bargaining.

      “What’ll you give? Oughter git that hand of yourn fixed up. Boom hit that?” Jim ignored the thrust. Money would talk.

      “Two of you own the launch? Call your profits fifteen a day apiece. That’s more than it is on an average. I’ll give you thirty dollars.”

      “We got our customers to consider. Orders to fill.”

      “Tell ’em it was an off day. You don’t always have luck.”

      “Do it for fifty dollars—cash in advance.”

      “Deal closed.” Jim tried vainly to get his right hand at his money. It would not go into his pocket. But he worked it out and handed over twenty dollars, displaying enough to set the fishermen’s minds at rest about their pay. “Thirty more when we hit New Bedford,” he told them. “Now for a mug-up.”

      The launch was sturdy enough, but not designed for speed or grace. It wallowed into New Bedford at eleven o’clock, helped by the tide. They passed half a dozen power schooners, but Jim had not seen enough of Swenson’s craft to recognize it, save by the figures instead of name on her boats. Nor would recognition have delayed him. He had evolved a theory that Foster, at back of Swenson—though he admitted even in his biased mood that such a connection between an unprincipled, almost outlawed bully and a prosperous manufacturer seemed incongruous—had planned on securing the figures together with the person of Lyman, and thus get possession of the pearls