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a glimmer of the stars. On its edge he saw a great black hand.

He was not alone. There was a man in the sea behind him, swimming, and pushing the cover along with one hand on it.

Yarde could not see anything of him but that one hand. He melted into the night. The broken reflections of stars twinkled along his sides as he swam, and that alone gave him substance, that and the hand. The tremendous, mournful music of his voice belonged to the sea and the sky, and was not human. Yarde could not understand what he said.

But he was not lost. He understood that. He lay on the heave of the quiet, warm, black sea, linked to existence by the black hand on the edge of the white wood. He crawled near it and went to sleep.

§ 3

When he roused, it was dawn. The cover had been pushed up and grounded on sand. This sand and the sighing, quiet ocean and the sky were all palpitating with rose color. Little flickering, rosy flames seemed to race with the reflections of ripples on the beach. Only the man lying beside the cover, one arm across his eyes, one hand yet grasping the edge of the wood, was a dark shadow in all that radiance.

Young Yarde gathered his weak limbs together and looked down at his rescuer. He saw a big, black sailor, wearing ragged dungaree breeches held up by a broad leather belt. He was magnificently built. He must have swum many hours. His flesh was all grayed and crinkled with the sea, and tiny crystals of salt glittered in his woolly hair and in the thatch of his great chest.

Shivering, Yarde leaned nearer. The man stirred; his arm dropped from his face. Yarde shrank back.

It was an inexpressibly somber and savage face, low in the brow, with a great out-thrust jaw and a broad nose; across one hollowed cheek ran a pinkish scar. It was a face from the older world; Yarde was ten thousand years younger than it. It filled him with the panic of a dream, for his nerves were rotten by inheritance. He leaped from the cover, and ran yelling up the sand.

He knew that the black sailor had come to his feet in a lithe bound and was running after him; he heard a great booming cry. Warm, drenched, and sick with incredible terror, the boy ran on. He did not know where he was going. He just ran, clear across the sand-bar and into the sea again. There he dropped. The bright sky and the foam met over his face, a vast silver dazzle. The last thing he was aware of was a huge black hand swooping from the dazzle and plucking him forth as if he were a fish.

Young Yarde was pretty bad that day. He did n't know much until it was night again; then he woke beside a small fire. The sand about it was warm. He felt naturally sleepy. Some one was patting him on the back, steadily, to a monotonous, murmured rhythm, as a mother pats a child to sleep. The great black sailor was squatting beside him; the black hand rose and fell softly, ceaselessly, pat, pat, pat, pat. Yarde slept.

He woke in full sunlight, very hungry; he stood up. His clothes were dry; the sea sparkled like a faceted gem. No one was in sight, but the driftwood coals glowed. From the fireside a man's footprints led down to the sea,

savage footprints, long, with perfect toes, pointing inward. Yarde followed the track.

The sailor was lying stretched on white rocks above a blue pool. His sinewy arm swung down like a shadow; his hand hovered above the water. In a moment, while Yarde watched, the hand dashed into the pool. There was a scatter of white drops; then the man pulled out a jerking silver fish. He got up, and strode to Yarde across the rocks, his long, black shadow no blacker than he. His face took the light, heavy, scarred, terrible with the unmeaning fierceness of an ancient sculpture. Yarde mastered his dread of that face; he went to meet the man. He said:

"Where are we?"

The man answered, but Yarde could not understand. It was some kind of melodious, mutilated French. He stood with the wriggling fish in one hand, and pointed seaward with the other, which he swept three or four times in a half-circle. Yarde thought he meant something about a ship, that they might be taken off in three or four days. He looked about, shivering with fear and loneliness. They appeared to be on a small sandy island fringed with white limestone rocks. Hard-leaved bushes grew in the sand; in one place there was green grass. Here a small spring trickled, and Yarde ran and drank as though he would never stop.

The sailor followed him closely; his towering shadow fell across Yarde. The boy looked up and asked hoarsely: "Who are you?"

The man did not appear to understand; his face did not change. His eyes had just the fierce, heavy stare of a bull's. In his hand the fish yet

jerked. He laid it on the rock, and crushed the life out of it with one stroke of his heel. Yarde shivered again; yet when the man strode back to the fire, he followed, and ate ravenously of the fish cooked on the wood coals.

The day passed. Yarde was weak and dozed a great deal. The black sailor sat with his knees drawn up and his chin resting on them, staring immovably out to sea; but Yarde knew that the man was aware of all he did, of every movement he made.

It was terrible to be alone on that island with another human being with whom no communication was possible. Neither could understand the other. Yarde felt silence shutting in on him. He woke from his dozes screaming, trying to push it away, to break it.

When night came, he slipped off in the darkness and hid behind the rocks. He did not want to sleep by the fire near the sailor. It grew cold when the sun dipped; the rocks were wet with dew. The sea had a hollow, melancholy sound.

With the first stars, it was as if the island had sent out a voice into the forsaken seas-a voice, musical, deep, heavy with years of solitude, "A-hoo-o-o! a-ho-0-0-0!”

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It was like being carried by an animal, a machine, a great automaton impervious to any appeal. Yarde shrieked to be put down, to be let go. The sailor did not seem to hear; he strode on. Yarde struck him. It was like striking metal warmed with life; the black face against the stars never changed its appalling and savage serenity. When the man laid Yarde down in the sand beside the small fire, the boy broke into hysterical weeping. He wept himself faint. Then he was aware of a slow and steady motion, soft, relentless. The black sailor was holding him down in the sand with one hand and patting him with the other.

Pat, pat, pat; pat, pat; pat-it was like the pulse of time, the tick of a

clock, the beat of a great heart. It was like the heart of all humanity, for which Yarde hungered, which he had never reached, beating there between the night and the sea. It swept Yarde into sleep as though it had been a drug.

Next day he was much stronger, but that enabled him to feel fear all the more acutely. The loneliness, the separateness, of youth was intensified in the son of Gibson and Laure, the promoter of bubble companies and the light woman. He had no steadfastness, no confidence, no resource of endurance. He began to question, to wonder, facing the locked puzzle of existence. "Why did the man save me? Why is he taking care of me this way?"

He could not get away from the

sailor. The man was always there, always watchful. If Yarde slipped out of his sight, he followed with his tremendous, mournful call. Yarde thought: "He must know who I am. He must be doing it for a reward."

That thought held comfort. He imagined himself filling with gold the black hand that saved him; he saw it that way—just the hand dripping gold dollars supplied by Gibson.

Then, as it drew toward night, he lost that thought. He remembered He remembered tales of shipwreck and hunger. He imagined that black hand slowly scraping the sand, scraping it into a grave. He imagined worse things. Shut in his prison of loneliness, he pictured the extreme horrors of the

sea.

Why had the sailor saved him? Did he know who he was? Why did he watch so closely? Why did he keep so near? Why?

84

Yarde had collected a heap of driftwood for himself, and dried it in the sun. Only with the dark did he remember that he had no matches. The sailor had some in a water-tight box in his belt. Yarde was afraid to ask for one, though he had worked all day with the determination to have a fire of his own that night.

When it was quite dark, he slipped away. He walked rapidly over the sand, through the bushes, across the rocks; he walked and walked. Soon he heard the sailor following him in the dark. He walked on. The sailor came up with him, spoke to him in his deep voice, mournfully. Yarde walked on. The sailor stepped in front of him and laid on his breast a black hand. At the touch the boy's body

bowed together. He stopped, quivering, and the sailor led him back to the fire.

The fire made a little round glow in the night. Still holding Yarde with one hand, the sailor stooped, and with the other hand scooped a hollow in the sand just long enough for the boy to lie down in. He gently pushed Yarde into it. Yarde lay there, shaking, in a cold sweat.

He stared up at the marching stars. If he turned his head one way, he saw nothing but blackness. If he turned his head the other way, there was the sailor squatting in the firelight, watching him with a savage, impenetrable regard. Again and again Yarde looked fearfully at that unreadable face. Why was the man guarding him so closely?

Once he started from a doze, weak with sickening terror. He was quite in the dark; the fire had died down, and over his face, between it and the warm, sleepy stars, hovered the shape of a hand. It descended, touched his face, his throat. With a sob, Yarde fainted.

The next day was a bar of fierce sunlight, blackened with his increasing terror of the night to come. That terror was so intense that he felt none of the fear natural to his circumstances. He did not fear thirst, hunger, or death. He feared the sailor, he feared the night. At last this came. He knew it was no use hiding. He went, shaking, and lay down by the little fire the sailor had made. He remained there alone. Presently he fell asleep.

He woke in the middle of the night, the vast night striding, as it were, with a huge visible motion over the sea and the island. It seemed to advance with a cry. Yarde sat up. He

knew it was the sailor who was crying.

He crept among the rocks. Soon he saw the sailor, a great black figure upon the highest rock of all. At intervals he threw back his head; he sent the mighty music of his voice rolling into the dark:

"Ah-ho-o-o-o! ah-ho-0-0-0-0!"

He was like some dark priest of the night calling upon his gods to come. Yarde shuddered, and fled back to the fire. All night that great voice rolled over him, wordless, beautiful, appalling, "Ah-ho-o-o-o! ah-ho-o-o-o!"

Why was the man up there, awake in the night, and calling? Yarde found no answer, and he could not ask. If he could have reached the sailor, it would not have been so bad; but they were shut off from each other in loneliness.

The next day Yarde tried desperately to communicate with the sailor. He talked, chattered, sang, whistled, gesticulated, drew things on the sand. It was like dancing in propitiation before some jungle god cut in black stone, so impassive was the wild face, so somber the bull-like stare. He desisted at last. He repeated to himself: "It's all right. It'll be all right. He knows who I am."

After catching a couple of small fish, the sailor busied himself that day carrying all the dry wood up to the topmost rock: There was nothing in this to make Yarde uneasy; yet, as the darkness inevitably advanced, he grew desperately uneasy. If only he could have asked the man what he wanted the wood for, and received the obvious answer, "To make a signal-fire." He could n't ask, and he could n't get that answer. The sailor built the wood in the form of a pyre, and Yarde could not reach his mind to find out anything.

That night the sailor lighted the fire. Yarde lay in the sand beneath, sick with blind terror. As the sailor stalked round the fire to feed it, his huge shadow passed over the sand, over Yarde, out to sea.

Yarde knew that he could stand no more of it. He would die of fright if he stopped on the island; he would die if he tried to get off. But better that than waiting with the sailor.

Fear made Yarde, the stupid, beautiful youth, as cunning as a weasel. It was just as if he were drunk with fear, and therefore abnormally intelligent.

The sailor had not slept for two nights. If he would sleep by day, Yarde thought he might be able to launch the hatch-cover, which still lay above the tide-mark, and float off on it. He would rather surrender himself to the sea, which lay in a vast blue ring under the sun, than to the nameless air of mystery that made the island a prison by day and a horror by night.

All the next day he waited, watching the sailor, and drinking deep of the spring. He did not know if he would ever drink again, and he had suddenly discovered the excellence of cold water on hot lips. He had nothing in which he could carry water, nor any food, for he could not catch fish in his hand as the sailor did. But his fear was so intense that this did not hinder him.

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