Complete Works of Howard Pyle

by Howard Pyle

  Jack and Tom were busy scaling and cleaning their fish when, all of a sudden, a shadow fell as though a hand had been stretched out across the sky. Jack ran out of the hut with his knife in his hand, and the next moment Tom heard him calling to him in a loud voice, bidding him to hurry out and look at what was coming. Then Tom dropped everything and ran.

  As I said before, there was not a breath of air stirring, and yet a black ragged wrack of clouds was flying wildly above their heads. This bellying sheet of clouds hung very low in the air; above them it was of a dull leaden color, rimmed with a strange reddish light, but toward the west it was as black as ink. Although there was no wind going, a cold air seemed to breathe out of the black emptiness of the west, just such as you may feel when you open the door of a cool room in the summer time. The ocean near to them was grey, with the light from the east, and every now and then a white-cap would gleam, with a pallid light against the darkness behind; but in the distance it grew darker and darker, until the rim of the horizon was lost in the inky pall beyond. Every moment the gloom fell about them, until it seemed as though night had set in, though it was a good hour till sundown. A dull, whispering moaning sound came from out the hollow of the west, and Tom could hear it through all the beating and thundering of the surf behind him. There was something awful in that moaning that seemed to fill the air above and around them; both men stood looking out toward the west, and neither of them said a word. Tom noticed how the sea gulls were running restlessly up and down the beach, uttering shrill wild cries every now and then, but not taking to wing.

  And every moment the deep moaning grew louder and louder.

  Suddenly a faint breath of air came, and instantly the sound of the surf to the east was dulled as though a blanket had been spread over it. Then there was a pause, — then there was a wild sweep of the wind, — then, in an instant, the hollow roar was upon them and around them.

  Out from the blackness of the west came rushing an awful grey cloud of mist and rain and salt spray, and before I can write these words, it struck the island with a tremendous and thunderous uproar. Tom and Jack were flung backward and down to the ground as though a wall had fallen upon them, and all around them was a blinding gloom of sand and rain and spray. Through this whirling darkness Tom saw the cutter lifted up and tossed over and over like a dead leaf. Even through all the uproar he could distinctly hear the noise of snapping and rending and tearing, as the trees and bushes of the thicket near to them were being torn up by the roots. Then he had a vision of one of the palmetto trees being whirled through the air as though it were a straw.

  For a while he lay clinging flat to the ground, digging his fingers into the sand; but after a while he saw that Jack was crawling on his hands and knees toward the lee of the sand hills, not far away from where they lay; then he followed him in like manner.

  It was a great while before they got safely to the shelter of the duns; I suppose that it could not have taken them less than half an hour to cross the two hundred yards of sand that lay between them and the lee of the sand hills. Every now and then a heavier gust than usual would come, and then they would lay flat upon the sand again, holding on to the shifting surface, as though they feared being blown bodily away. But between the gusts they would contrive to crawl a few feet farther.

  At last they reached the lee of the hills, and so were sheltered from the full force of the wind, though the hurricane bellowed and roared above and around them with a noise such as Tom never heard before or since.

  The rain increased till it fell in torrents; it did not beat down the wind, for the tempest blew more and more heavily until just before morning, when it was something frightful.

  All that night the rain poured down upon them in a deluge, but I do not think that either of them noticed it, their minds being taken up with quite different matters. The darkness around them was utter and blank beyond what I can tell you. You could not have seen your hand within six inches of your face. It seemed as though the end of all things had come.

  Tom and Jack sat hand in hand; — when one of them said anything to the other, he had to put his lips to within an inch of his companion’s ear, to make him understand a single word. But very little was said between them, and most of the time they sat holding one another’s hand in silence. Now and then the ground would actually tremble beneath them, and at times a dim fear passed through Tom’s mind that the very sand hill above them would be carried bodily away with the force of that tremendous blast. About day-break, or what would have been day-break at an ordinary time, the rain ceased to fall, though the hurricane still raged with nearly as much fury as ever.

  At last the faint grey daylight came, and after a while they were able to see the things around them pretty clearly. The first thing that Tom saw was a white sea gull crouched on the ground close to him. He could have reached out his hand and have touched it, but it did not seem to be in the least afraid at his presence. There were hundreds of them around, but they all seemed to be dulled with terror, and made no effort to move out of the way, or to take to flight.

  At length, in the dim morning light, the ocean came out before them; it was a strange sight, for the surf was beaten down by the wind, until the sand beach reached out half as far again as it did on ordinary occasions.

  At first they could see nothing of the sandy hook to the southward, for, though no sea was running, and though the ocean was leveled to a seething sheet of whiteness, the water was banked up in the bay, and covered the sand spit completely. The first thought that occurred to Tom was that the whole bar had been swallowed up, and that there had been an earthquake, though they had not noticed it in all the bewilderment of the tempest. But, as the light grew stronger and stronger, they could see the gleam of wet sand here and there, and then could see the water running over it from the bay to the ocean.

  By this time the storm was beginning to fall, though they did not dare to leave their shelter for an hour or so later, and though the wind was still heavy until the middle of the afternoon.

  When they did leave the lee of the hill, the sight was strange enough; the palmetto trees were all gone but one, and it was more than half stripped of leaves.

  One of them had been carried more than a quarter of a mile, and was now lying half buried in the sand at the base of the dun, beneath which they had taken shelter.

  There was not a sign of their home in the sand hill, for not only was the place levelled over as completely as though it had never been, but the very shape of the hills themselves had been changed by the sand that had blown against them here, or had been carried away from them there.

  The cutter had been swept away to a distance of two or three hundred yards. It had lodged in a hollow between two of the duns. It was lying keel up, and the sand was banked around the weather side of it like a snowdrift. Strange enough, it was not much more broken than it had been before, so they got it back again in a day or two, and it was still sound enough to serve for their roof for the balance of the time that they stayed on the island.

  The great stack of brushwood that they had heaped on the highest sand-dun had all been carried away, as had also their signal tree with the bush lashed to it. Everything was salt with the spray that had been carried inland, and the island flats were dotted all over with pools of salt water, that had been blown or swept over the land. Wherever this salt water lay the grass was killed or blackened, so that the following summer the island looked as though fire had passed over it.

  Such was the great hurricane of 1814 as Tom Granger and Jack Baldwin felt it; and I think that they both felt it in its full force, though they escaped from it with no more harm than a thorough wetting and a great fright. It took them several weeks to do what they could at making good the damage done, and then it was not fully repaired, for all the provisions that they had stored up had been carried away or had been covered up by the sand that had been blown before the blast.

  I think that the greatest loss that they suffered was that of Tom’s jack
-knife. He had left it lying beside the fish that he was in the act of cleaning when Jack had called to him and he had run out of the hut. They looked for it every now and then for several days afterward, digging about the place where it had been lost; but their hut or cave in the sand hill had been so completely covered, and the lay of the hill itself had been so entirely changed, that they never found it again.

  The loss of a jack-knife may seem but a small thing to tell you, who have only had to slip around the corner and buy a new one at the nearest hardware shop. But there was no hardware shop near to Jack and Tom, and the loss of the jack-knife was a very great ill to them.

  Neither did they ever see the tame sea-gull again, and they missed the sight of it from the keel of the upturned boat. I suppose that it must have been swept away and have perished in the hurricane.

  CHAPTER XII.

  AND NOW A little more than a week had passed since the great hurricane of which I have just told you fell upon them. I recollect that it was a Sunday morning. Sundays were generally spent in doing no work, and in taking a stroll around the island. But they had had no rest since the day of the storm, for the time between then and now had all been spent in repairing the damages that had been wrought. Now they were pretty comfortably settled again, and the day being bright and fair, they had fixed that it should be spent in taking a look about them.

  It was cool and pleasant, and they strolled leisurely up the western side of the island, skirting the belt of Mangrove bushes, around the northern end, past the barren sand flat, and so down the Atlantic beach again. By the middle of the afternoon they had come back to the lower end of the island, and had gone out on to the spit.

  The water that had washed over this place on the day of the storm had carried away a great deal of the sand. The surf ran much farther up the beach, and Tom noticed that the ribs of the wreck stood higher out of the sand than he had ever seen them. They did not go farther than the wreck, but laid themselves down close to it, looking out across the water toward the distant island that was then looming to the southward, talking about it and about their chances of getting to it.

  Jack was in a more than usually downhearted state as to their not being able to get away from the place that they were on. He said that so far as he could see, they might have to live there all their lives and then die, and no one be the wiser of it. Tom was feeling gloomy himself on this particular day, and he felt very impatient at poor Jack when he began his complaining. He felt that if complaints were to be made, it was he that should make them, and not Jack, for had he not much more to lose by staying where he was than the other? I know how selfish this was, but there are times when we are given over to spells of selfishness, and, though such a state may be very wrong, it is yet very natural.

  “You might just as well have patience, Jack,” said he, “We’ve tried to get away already, and you know what came of it. We certainly can’t live here forever without sighting a vessel of some sort at some time or other.”

  “We haven’t seen a sign of a ship up to this time,” said Jack, gloomily.

  “That’s very true, and maybe we’ll have to wait till the war’s over before one comes along. You know very well that there’s no shipping being done nowadays.”

  “Wait till the war’s over!” cried Jack, raising himself suddenly on his elbow; “why, heavens and earth, man, it may be half a dozen years to come, before the war’s over!”

  “Perhaps it may be a dozen years, for all that I know,” said Tom, “but all the same you’ll have to wait, so you may just as well keep your tongue still between your teeth, and be patient about it!”

  “Wait?” cried Jack, and he thumped his clenched fist down on the sand. “By G — I’ll not wait! I’ll do something; see if I don’t! I’ll not let any twenty miles of water keep me tied up in this God-forsaken place! Why don’t you do something? You’re so full of your d — d contrivances for making us comfortable; why don’t you puzzle out some plan for getting us off altogether?”

  Tom was lying on the sand, his hands under his head, and one leg crossed comfortably over the other. He did not move while Jack was talking, and he made a point of seeming to be very easy under it, but he was getting more and more angry all the time. He did not answer Jack immediately, but after a while he spoke as quietly as he could.

  “You’re unreasonable, Jack,” said he. “Haven’t I done everything that I could do to get us away; haven’t I built a raft and put up signals on the sand hills; haven’t I set a dozen or more bladder-bags adrift? The chances are that some of them’ll be picked up, and in good time a ship’ll come to us. I don’t see that you have any reason to complain, and if you have reason, you’d better try to do something yourself; — you’re welcome to it. As for our getting away; — we’ve tried to get away already, and you know what came of it. In my opinion we came so devilish near getting away, that we liked never to have got back to this or to any other island.”

  “Do you mean to say that you’re so scared at a little risk that you’re afraid to try it over again?”

  “I don’t know about being scared, but I certainly ain’t going to try it over again.”

  “You ain’t?”

  “No.”

  Jack did not say a word for a little while, but Tom felt that he was looking at him very hard. At last he spoke again.

  “It’s my belief, Tom Granger,” said he, “that you haven’t got an ounce of pluck left about you. I believe that you’re that dull that you’d be content to live here forever, if you could get enough to fill your belly!”

  This was too much for Tom. He sat up suddenly, facing the other. “Jack Baldwin,” said he, and his voice trembled with his anger, “understand me, once for all. If we’re to live together, or to talk together, or to have anything to do with one another, I never want to hear such speech from your mouth as you’ve just given me; do you understand me?”

  Here he paused for a moment, and then he burst out passionately: “What do you know how much I want to get away? Do you suppose that I don’t want to get away because I don’t keep up an everlasting whimpering and whining about it, as you do? What do you want to get away for, anyhow? Is the only woman that you love in all the world waiting at home for you, looking for you, and praying for you, and wondering why she don’t hear from you — thinking, maybe, that you’re dead. God help her! I wish that I was dead, and that she knew it. It would be better for us both, I guess!” Then he rested his elbows on his knees and buried his face in his hands, rocking his body to and fro as he sat.

  Jack did not say another word, and in a few moments Tom heard him get up and walk away. After a little while Tom got a grip on himself and looked up again.

  Jack was standing just below the wreck and over toward the ocean. He had gathered what seemed to be a handful of small, black, flat shells, and he was busy in skimming them out across the surf. Presently Tom got up and walked slowly over to where he was standing. He was heartily ashamed of the way in which he had spoken to the other, and would have given a great deal if he could only have recalled his words; but that is a thing that can never be done. He stood a little behind Jack, with his hands in his breeches pockets, looking down at the sand the while. After a while Jack spoke, without looking around.

  “Look’ee, Tom Granger,” said he, doggedly, “I’m sorry I spoke to you the way that I did. I didn’t know that you had a sweetheart at home, — you ought to ha’ told me before. I’ll never say any more about getting away, if I have to stay on this d — d island to the crack of doom, and that I promise you.”

  “That’s all right,” muttered Tom; “don’t let’s say any more about it.”

  One of the round black things that Jack was skimming out to sea, lay at his feet, and without knowing what he did, he stooped and picked it up as he was speaking. He turned it over and over in his palm in an absent sort of a way, for he was feeling very uncomfortable at the time.

  He turned it over and over, until, after a while, it worked through his sigh
t into his mind; then he looked more closely at it, for he had never seen the like of it before. It was not a shell, neither was it a pebble, for there were no pebbles on the island. It was thin and perfectly round, and as black as ink. On one side of it was a raised surface that bore a faint likeness to the rude image of a head; below this was something that looked like a row of small figures. He brushed it smooth with the palm of his hand, and then looked more closely at it, turning it around and around, and this way and that. All of a sudden a thought struck him, and I cannot describe the thrill that went through him as he looked at that which he held. As this thought went through his mind, he closed his hand and looked slowly around him, as though he was in a dream. I can distinctly recollect that that singular feeling which we all have felt at times passed over him; — a feeling as though all this had happened before, but as though it had happened in a dream. Then he looked at the object once more, and could just make out the figures; — they were 1, 7, 9 and 2. He picked at the edge of the disk, and a white sparkle followed the scratching of his thumb nail.

  “Good Lord, Jack!” cried he, “look! look!”

  There was a ring in his voice that made Jack jump as though he had been struck. “Look at what, Tom?” said he, in a half-frightened voice.

  “Look at this!” said Tom, and he held out that which he had picked up a minute before. “What do you think it is?”

  Jack had three or four of them in his own hand. “I don’t know,” said he, turning them over and over. Suddenly he too began to look more closely at them. “Why, Tom — Tom—” he began, “is it — is it—”

  “It’s money; — it’s silver money, Jack, as sure as I am a living sinner!”