The Tides of Barnegat Part 39

Lucy lifted her terrified face, burst into tears, and reached out her hands to Jane.

"Oh, sister,--sister!" she moaned. "What shall I do? Oh, if I had never come home! Can't you think of some way? You have always been so good--Oh, please! please!"

Jane drew Lucy toward her.

"I will do all I can, dear. If I fail there is only one resource left.

That is the truth, and all of it. Max can save you, and he will if he loves you. Tell, him everything!"

CHAPTER XXI

THE MAN IN THE SLOUCH HAT

The wooden arrow on the top of the cupola of the Life-Saving Station had had a busy night of it. With the going down of the sun the wind had continued to blow east-southeast--its old course for weeks--and the little sentinel, lulled into inaction, had fallen into a doze, its feather end fixed on the glow of the twilight.

At midnight a rollicking breeze that piped from out the north caught the sensitive vane napping, and before the dawn broke had quite tired it out, s.h.i.+fting from point to point, now west, now east, now nor'east-by-east, and now back to north again. By the time Morgan had boiled his coffee and had cut his bacon into slivers ready for the frying-pan the restless wind, as if ashamed of its caprices, had again veered to the north-east, and then, as if determined ever after to lead a better life, had pulled itself together and had at last settled down to a steady blow from that quarter.

The needle of the aneroid fastened to the wall of the sitting-room, and in reach of everybody's eye, had also made a night of it. In fact, it had not had a moment's peace since Captain Holt reset its register the day before. All its efforts for continued good weather had failed.

Slowly but surely the baffled and disheartened needle had sagged from "Fair" to "Change," dropped back to "Storm," and before noon the next day had about given up the fight and was in full flight for "Cyclones and Tempests."

Uncle Isaac Polhemus, sitting at the table with one eye on his game of dominoes (Green was his partner) and the other on the patch of sky framed by the window, read the look of despair on the honest face of the aneroid, and rising from his chair, a "double three" in his hand, stepped to where the weather prophet hung.

"Sompin's comin' Sam," he said solemnly. "The old gal's got a bad setback. Ain't none of us goin' to git a wink o' sleep to-night, or I miss my guess. Wonder how the wind is." Here he moved to the door and peered out. "Nor'-east and puffy, just as I thought. We're goin' to hev some weather, Sam--ye hear?--some WEATHER!" With this he regained his chair and joined the double three to the long tail of his successes.

Good weather or bad weather--peace or war--was all the same to Uncle Isaac. What he wanted was the earliest news from the front.

Captain Holt took a look at the sky, the aneroid and the wind--not the arrow; old sea-dogs know which way the wind blows without depending on any such contrivance--the way the clouds drift, the trend of the white-caps, the set of a distant sail, and on black, almost breathless nights, by the feel of a wet finger held quickly in the air, the coolest side determining the wind point.

On this morning the clouds attracted the captain's attention. They hung low and drifted in long, straggling lines. Close to the horizon they were ashy pale; being nearest the edge of the br.i.m.m.i.n.g sea, they had, no doubt, seen something the higher and rosier-tinted clouds had missed; something of the ruin that was going on farther down the round of the sphere. These clouds the captain studied closely, especially a prismatic sun-dog that glowed like a bit of rainbow snipped off by wind-scissors, and one or two dirt spots sailing along by themselves.

During the captain's inspection Archie hove in sight, wiping his hands with a wad of cotton waste. He and Parks had been swabbing out the firing gun and putting the polished work of the cart apparatus in order.

"It's going to blow, captain, isn't it?" he called out. Blows were what Archie was waiting for. So far the sea had been like a mill-pond, except on one or two occasions, when, to the boy's great regret, nothing came ash.o.r.e.

"Looks like it. Gla.s.s's been goin' down and the wind has settled to the nor'east. Some nasty dough-b.a.l.l.s out there I don't like. See 'em goin'

over that three-master?"

Archie looked, nodded his head, and a certain thrill went through him.

The harder it blew the better it would suit Archie.

"Will the Polly be here to-night?" he added. "Your son's coming, isn't he?"

"Yes; but you won't see him to-night, nor to-morrow, not till this is over. You won't catch old Ambrose out in this weather" (Captain Ambrose Farguson sailed the Polly). "He'll stick his nose in the basin some'er's and hang on for a spell. I thought he'd try to make the inlet, and I 'spected Bart here to-night till I saw the gla.s.s when I got up. Ye can't fool Ambrose--he knows. Be two or three days now 'fore Bart comes," he added, a look of disappointment shadowing his face.

Archie kept on to the house, and the captain, after another sweep around, turned on his heel and reentered the sitting-room.

"Green!"

"Yes, captain." The surfman was on his feet in an instant, his ears wide open.

"I wish you and Fogarty would look over those new Costons and see if they're all right. And, Polhemus, perhaps you'd better overhaul them cork jackets; some o' them straps seemed kind o' awkward on practice yesterday--they ought to slip on easier; guess they're considerable dried out and a little mite stiff."

Green nodded his head in respectful a.s.sent and left the room. Polhemus, at the mention of his name, had dropped his chair legs to the floor; he had finished his game of dominoes and had been tilted back against the wall, awaiting the dinner-hour.

"It's goin' to blow a livin' gale o' wind, Polhemus," the captain continued; "that's what it's goin' to do. Ye kin see it yerself. There she comes now!"

As he spoke the windows on the sea side of the house rattled as if shaken by the hand of a man and as quickly stopped.

"Them puffs are jest the tootin' of her horn--" this with a jerk of his head toward the windows. "I tell ye, it looks ugly!"

Polhemus gained his feet and the two men stepped to the sash and peered out. To them the sky was always an open book--each cloud a letter, each ma.s.s a paragraph, the whole a warning.

"But I'm kind o' glad, Isaac." Again the captain forgot the surfman in the friend. "As long as it's got to blow it might as well blow now and be over. I'd kind o' set my heart on Bart's comin', but I guess I've waited so long I kin wait a day or two more. I wrote him to come by train, but he wrote back he had a lot o' plunder and he'd better put it 'board the Polly; and, besides, he said he kind o' wanted to sail into the inlet like he used to when he was a boy. Then again, I couldn't meet him; not with this weather comin' on. No--take it all in all, I'm glad he ain't comin'."

"Well, I guess yer right, captain," answered uncle Isaac in an even tone, as he left the room to overhaul the cork jackets. The occasion was not one of absorbing interest to Isaac.

By the time the table was cleared and the kitchen once more in order not only were the windows on the sea side of the house roughly shaken by the rising gale, but the sand caught from the dunes was being whirled against their panes. The tide, too, egged on by the storm, had crept up the slope of the dunes, the spray drenching the gra.s.s-tufts.

At five o'clock the wind blew forty miles an hour at sundown it had increased to fifty; at eight o'clock it bowled along at sixty. Morgan, who had been to the village for supplies, reported that the tide was over the dock at Barnegat and that the roof of the big bathing-house at Beach Haven had been ripped off and landed on the piazza. He had had all he could do to keep his feet and his basket while crossing the marsh on his way back to the station. Then he added:

"There's a lot o' people there yit. That feller from Philadelphy who's mashed on Cobden's aunt was swellin' around in a potato-bug suit o'

clothes as big as life." This last was given from behind his hand after he had glanced around the room and found that Archie was absent.

At eight o'clock, when Parks and Archie left the Station to begin their patrol, Parks was obliged to hold on to the rail of the porch to steady himself, and Archie, being less sure of his feet, was blown against the water-barrel before he could get his legs well under him. At the edge of the surf the two separated for their four hours' patrol, Archie breasting the gale on his way north, and Parks hurrying on, helped by the wind, to the south.

At ten o'clock Parks returned. He had made his first round, and had exchanged his bra.s.s check with the patrol at the next station. As he mounted the sand-dune he quickened his steps, hurried to the Station, opened the sitting-room door, found it empty, the men being in bed upstairs awaiting their turns, and then strode on to the captain's room, his sou'wester and tarpaulin drenched with spray and sand, his hip-boots leaving watery tracks along the clean floor.

"Wreck ash.o.r.e at No. 14, sir!" Parks called out in a voice hoa.r.s.e with fighting the wind.

The captain sprang from his cot--he was awake, his light still burning.

"Anybody drownded?"

"No, sir; got 'em all. Seven of 'em, so the patrol said. Come ash.o.r.e 'bout supper-time."

"What is she?"

"A two-master from Virginia loaded with cord-wood. Surf's in bad shape, sir; couldn't nothin' live in it afore; it's wuss now. Everything's a bobble; turrible to see them sticks thras.h.i.+n' 'round and slammin'

things."

"Didn't want no a.s.sistance, did they?"

"No, sir; they got the fust line 'round the foremast and come off in less'n a hour; warn't none of 'em hurted."

"Is it any better outside?"