“Not this trip,” Blair said firmly. “We’ll be lucky if we get back without running into trouble as it is.”
“A bit of wind!” Julius retorted scornfully.
“It’s more than that,” Blair told him, grim-faced. “We can’t afford to take risks.”
“We’ve got a perfectly reliable engine on board,” Julius suggested, not quite so scornfully.
“I wouldn’t rely on anything in this part of the world,” Blair informed him.
He did not add that they should not have come so far north or that they should have sailed toward the more sheltered waters between Skye and the mainland, as he had suggested. He was not that sort of man, but Laura was aware of the leashed anger in him that might still prove ugly if it were provoked.
It was a silent return trip, with the wind now their enemy instead of their friend, and even Lance stopped his tuneless singing to help with the reefing of the heavy sails.
“We ought to make it,” Blair came aft to tell Laura with an assurance she wasn’t sure he felt. “Once we’re around Rhu Coigach we should be all right.”
Curiously enough, it was the skerries at the mouth of their own small loch that made Laura feel more anxious than anything else, and she hoped that Blair would take over the tiller before they reached them. As the wind rose, however, it became apparent that the men would have to take it in spells to steer Northern Bird on her course. The powerful, lashing turmoil of the sea pitted itself relentlessly against them, testing their strength and endurance to the utmost, and the long coastline seemed endless. Suilven and Canisp and Ben More Assynt were lost in mist long before they came to Rhu Coigach, and it was almost impossible to make out the indentations of the bays. Craggy headlands rose frighteningly close and disappeared behind them. They were in a lost world of sea and fog long before they neared the loch, with only the beating sound of the waves rising endlessly against them.
Northern Bird was tossed and flung about like a cork in the vicious crosscurrents of the North Minch, and Laura thought that they would be lucky to get back to Dunraven alive.
She had passed beyond fear now, but once or twice in the beginning, when Northern Bird had plunged into the trough of a wave, she had closed her eyes, waiting for the final impact that would spell their doom. When the gallant little yacht had ridden, quivering, to the crest of the next wave she had been aware of a strange triumph, a breathless sort of exaltation rejecting fear.
Julius took over the tiller when the final headland had slipped behind them into the mist and Blair came to stand beside her. Long afterward Laura was to remember the look he gave her, remember and cherish it, deep in her heart, because it told her of his love more plainly than any words could have done. There was admiration in it, too, as he said almost casually:
“We could make you skipper in a week or two, Laura!”
Lance, who had been hopelessly and ignominiously sick on the return journey, looked up from the companionway with abject apology in his eyes.
“Can I do anything to help?” he asked. “We’re almost home, aren’t we?”
“Almost,” Blair assured him. “Come up on deck and get some fresh air. You’ll feel better.”
They were using the engine now, tossing and twisting in the treacherous crosscurrents that ran between the low-lying skerries, and the sky behind them was ominously low and threatening. The first lashing of rain slanted viciously across the deck. In another half hour visibility would be nil.
As it was they could not see the land ahead of them. They seemed to be feeling their way through a steadily-deepening gray gloom.
Blair went aft to shout to Julius, who was already struggling with the tiller.
“I’ll take her in, if you like,” he offered.
Julius swung around to look at him. His hands had been gripping the tiller till the knuckles stood out white against his flesh, but there was a strange light of triumph in his eyes as he turned Blair’s suggestion aside.
“There’s no need for you to take over, Cameron,” he said. “I’ve brought her this far, haven’t I?”
“Yes,” Blair agreed abruptly, unprepared to argue with him, yet standing close beside him, his eyes on the still angry seas ahead.
Laura stood huddled in the far corner of the cockpit, wishing that Julius would let Blair take over. He knew these seas, and he knew the yacht far better than Julius did. This was no time for allowing pride and personal antagonism to creep in.
Like an enraged animal cheated of its prey, the wind seemed to increase in fury as they neared their destination and the blinding rain slanted more viciously across their line of vision.
“We can make it,” Blair said through set teeth. “Where’s Callum?”
“On deck.” Laura could just see Callum’s small, hunched figure crouched in its yellow oilskins, his dark face turned up to the wind and spume. He seemed to be reveling in the storm, as if it was all part of his natural element. “He seems to want to be up there right in the teeth of the wind!”
“Callum loves the sea and everything connected with it,” Blair said, without taking his eyes from Julius.
His own hands were clenched in the pockets of his oilskin coat and his mouth was grim, but that was the only sign he gave of tension.
Then, suddenly, as they approached the narrow entrance to the loch, there was a suggestion of change, a sound that had not been there before. It was several minutes before Laura realized that it came from the engine, but in those seconds both Blair and Lance had dived for the companionway. She heard Blair say something to her brother, but Lance’s answer was torn away by the wind.
Northern Bird lurched and rocked violently, and it was as much as Julius could do to hold on to the tiller.
“I can’t see a damned thing!” he cursed, peering through the rain. “Can you do something, Laura—that damned sail flapping all over the place—”
Lance’s inexpert sail lashing had come adrift and a triumphant wind was flicking it farther and farther out from the boom. It was not serious, but it was irritating to Julius in his present mood.
“I’ll see what I can do.”
She crawled on deck, tugging at the lashing, feeling the onslaught of the wind and rain tearing past her. She struggled against the elements in sudden personal conflict.
“It’s no better!” Julius yelled over the fury of the storm. “I still can’t see a thing!”
There was fear in his voice now, and Laura felt her throat go dry. As if for her immediate reassurance the engine struggled back into pulsing life, beating surely and steadily in the heart of the ship.
“It’s all right!” she cried, the small exultant note in her voice rising above the storm. “Blair will be up again in a moment!” She struggled farther along the deck and was unaware of Julius’s reply. “I’ll see if I can see any better up forward.”
The wind wrenched her voice away but she hung on to the veering boom, straining to see through the gloom ahead. There seemed to be nothing there but an endless tossing, spume-flecked waves—no land, no bay, no sanctuary. Northern Bird was being battered beyond endurance, caught in the crosscurrents that Blair had warned Julius about.
Blair, she thought. Blair! If only you could take over, everything would be all right! If only Julius would let you—
But he must! He must! This was madness. Callum came toward her, crouching along the wave-lashed deck, keeping his hold by a miracle, it seemed. He yelled something in her ear, but it was torn away by the wind.
“I can’t hear, Callum! I can’t hear—” she cried, her lips numb and salty with spray.
He pointed then, holding her arm in a vicelike grip, and she saw his face, curiously distorted for a moment as his strange dark eyes peered through the driving rain. Somehow she knew in that moment that Callum could see farther than any of them in such conditions, and the look on his face made her afraid.
“The kerries!” he shouted. “The seal rock—”
He turned savagely toward the cockpit, crawli
ng along the deck as Laura crouched beside the wet, reefed sail, holding on with all her strength and driven to her knees now because it was impossible to stand; all the while straining, straining to see beyond that awful pall of spume and rain.
The end came suddenly, almost quietly. At one moment there was nothing but an unbroken pall of grayness with all the fury of the storm loose above it; in the next she saw a vicious line of white juts, resembling bared teeth, breaking the sea ahead of them.
“The skerries!”
She was never quite sure whether she had shouted the warning or if the words had stuck somewhere in her throat. In any case, neither Julius nor anyone else could have heard her in such a storm. The gale seemed to lift her voice and throw it back at her with a mocking laugh as Northern Bird lurched violently to starboard. The next wave caught the boat directly. She seemed to hesitate, quiver, and plunge forward and upward, and then there was a horrible grinding sound that overlaid the wind. The engines thrashed on for a moment and died with a final shudder. They were on the reef.
A black confusion held Laura paralyzed for a second before she became conscious of Blair struggling along the deck toward her.
“The dinghy,” he yelled. “Get back to the dinghy. It’s our only hope—”
She struggled with him toward the davits. Northern Bird had gone over on her side, and every savage gust buffeted her afresh. In no time the tide would pull her back off the rocks and the hungry sea would claim her.
The dinghy hung drunkenly from one running block; the other had been torn away. Blair wrenched at it savagely and somewhere behind them Laura heard Callum’s voice.
“Get Lance!” Blair’s swift command came above the howling of the wind. “He’s down below—”
Laura’s heart seemed to miss a beat as she wondered how badly the cabins and engine room were flooded, but Callum had already disappeared and Blair was helping her into the dinghy.
It looked as if it would not survive for more than a second in that boiling maelstrom of churning sea, but she tumbled in and lay crouched on the heaving floorboards, waiting for the others to come. The dinghy held five normally, but in a sea like this...
She thrust the ugly thought from her, struggling with the heavy tarpaulin Blair had flung in after her. It would be all the shelter they would have till they reached the shore.
“You’ll have to hold on, Laura,” Blair yelled. “I’m going back. Something has happened down there—”
She knew that he had little more than a second or two. Already Northern Bird was slipping, inch by inch, from the savage rock that had torn the bottom out of her; already she was listing dangerously, the waves breaking over her sloping deck. The boom had broken away and the slashed remnants of the mainsail lifted on the water like a white shroud.
Laura held on to the davit ropes with no other thought in her mind but her brother’s safety. Lance must not die like this, trapped down there in the cabin by the relentless pressure of an angry sea. There was Blair—and Callum—to bring him up.
The dinghy rose and fell with the surge of the waves against the yacht’s side and she could think of nothing now but the desperate effort she must make to hold on. Her hands were numb to the point where they felt detached from her body, and the rain blinded her. Seconds that seemed hours went by before she saw the huddled figures on the deck above her, before she heard Blair shout:
“He’s unconscious. You’ll have to watch his head when we lower him.”
She could do nothing to help except go on clinging to the davit in a last desperate effort to steady the dinghy as Lance was lowered in beside her. She could see Callum up on Northern Birds deck with Blair, and then Northern Bird herself seemed to lurch and sway like a drunken thing.
There was a moment when the wind appeared to drop altogether and the sea stood arrested, waiting to receive her, and then she began to slip slowly, gracefully back off the reef.
Blair jumped into the dinghy and Callum dived from the yacht’s deck into the waves. Laura saw Blair struggling with the outboard motor, its weight against him as he swung it into place over the stern, and then he turned to look for Callum. The outboard sputtered into life and pulled away as Northern Bird went down, steadily, proudly, into the waves.
They could see Callum’s head as he began to swim, wet and dark as a seal’s, and suddenly they knew that he had struck out in the opposite direction. When they looked again he had gone.
Blair circled twice, and then, with a grim mouth and darkly unfathomable eyes, he set the dinghy’s nose resolutely toward the shore.
“Julius—?” Laura asked in a small, harsh voice while she bent over her unconscious brother.
“He was in the yacht,” Blair told her without emotion. “Still in the cockpit. He was dead. There was a gash on his head where he had hit something as he fell, perhaps—” He paused for a moment, looking steadily ahead. “Callum had taken over at the tiller, but it was too late.”
She did not ask Blair if he thought that Callum had killed Julius, but she again recalled the slaughtered seal and Callum’s angry, contorted face.
There seemed nothing to think about after that but Lance. She huddled beside him under the tarpaulin and prayed that he would not die. Congealed blood matted the thick thatch of hair which had grown so long during the holidays, and his face was pale and pinched-looking about the nostrils. She was certain they would reach the shore now. The dinghy bounced like a cork, but the gallant little motor sputtered on, driving them slowly but surely ahead.
When they reached the inner headland and passed beyond it, the wind was suddenly cut off. Blair throttled back the outboard and they drifted gently to shore.
He went right in behind the island, to the sheltered bay where Northern Bird had stood all winter, poised above the machar, waiting for the day when she would reach the sea again.
Dunraven stood darkly above them, silhouetted against the storm-wracked sky, and Morag came running at the sound of the outboard.
The keel grated on firm sand, and it was only then, perhaps, that Laura felt the full impact of the last half hour. Her legs felt as if they must give way under her, and her lips trembled as she tried to answer Morag’s questions.
Blair was down on his knees, examining Lance, and when he stood up his mouth was grim.
“We’ll have to make some sort of stretcher,” he said. “It’s going to be dangerous to move him even this short distance.”
Laura stood quite still, frozen into a helpless sort of immobility by the knowledge that Lance was seriously injured. Whatever had happened when the yacht struck the reef, it had resulted in the ugly gash on her brother's head, which appeared to be about four inches long and very deep. He had probably still been in the engine room and had struck some sharp obstacle as he fell.
Tears began to gather in her eyes, but she brushed them swiftly away.
Blair came back across the sand, carrying a deck chair. It was the best he could do, and they lifted Lance on to it, covering him with Morag’s shawl.
Even in this comparatively sheltered spot, it was a struggle to reach the house with their burden against the wind. They laid Lance down in the hall and Morag rushed to boil water while Blair went over him carefully, inch by inch.
Laura watched the sure, steady surgeon’s hands, probing gently, leaving nothing to conjecture or chance, and after a second or two Blair straightened and looked at her.
"There seems to be nothing else,” he said, “apart from the wound in the head.”
His tone turned her blood to ice.
“You mean—could it be fatal?” she asked bleakly.
“It’s a hospital job,” he told her, because he knew that she wanted the truth.
“And there isn’t that sort of hospital within miles," she said in a frozen whisper. “That’s what you’re trying to tell me, Blair, isn’t it? It’s a specialist’s job.”
He looked away from her agonized eyes.
“I’m afraid so,” he said. “There’s consi
derable pressure—probably from a bone fracture. It would be more than dangerous to move him, and certainly we can’t take him any distance.”
Laura continued to look at him as if she did not understand, and then she said with the utmost conviction:
“You can do it, Blair. I’ll help—and Morag. There’s no other way.” She saw him hesitate, doubting himself for an instant, but her eyes continued to hold his, willing him to do this thing—for her.
“There are instruments in Julius’s case,” she told him calmly. “All you will need. I’ll sterilize them while you and Morag get the kitchen ready. We’ve got plenty of hot-water bottles and blankets, and—and—”
Her voice trailed off as she looked up at him. They had probably both thought about the anesthetic at the same time, but now it was Blair who was determined to sweep every obstacle from their path.
“We’ll find something,” he said. “We can’t afford to waste a lot of time. Seconds could be precious at this stage.”
He was bending over Lance again, his lean dark face animated by the challenge Laura had thrust at him, strengthened by it and guided as he used to be by a very simple faith. He had rarely, if ever, felt that he worked entirely alone.
For the next two hours the atmosphere in the big, stone-flagged kitchen at Dunraven remained electric. After Blair had given Lance the first injection, Laura kept her eyes firmly riveted on his hands, but there was no hesitation there. She hadn’t really expected it. She had been sure from the beginning that he could do this thing, but when it was all over and the adhesive bandages were in place on the shaven area of her brother’s head, she felt as if a dreadful, crushing weight had been lifted too suddenly from her shoulders.
The relief of freedom stunned her for a moment and then she collapsed into Morag’s arms with a long-drawn-out sigh.
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