Taffy stood for a moment listening.
He judged the wreck to be somewhere on the near side
of the light-house, between it and the mouth of the
creek; that was, if she had already struck. If
not, the gale and the set of the tide together would
be sweeping her eastward, perhaps right across the
mouth of the creek. And if he could discover
this his course would be to run back, intercept the
coast-guard, and send him around by the upper bridge.
He waited for a second signal to guide
him a flare or a rocket: but none
came. The beach lay in the lew of the weather,
deep in the hills’ hollow and trebly land-locked
by the windings of the creek, but above him the sky
kept its screaming as though the bare ridges of the
headland were being shelled by artillery.
He resolved to keep along the lower
slopes and search his way down to the creek’s
mouth, when he would have sight of any signal shown
along the coast for a mile or two to the east and
north-east. The night was now as black as a
wolf’s throat, but he knew every path and fence.
So he scrambled up the low cliff and began to run,
following the line of stunted oaks and tamarisks which
fenced it, and on the ridges where the
blown hail took him in the face crouching
and scuttling like a crab sideways, moving his legs
only from the knees down.
In this way he had covered half a
mile and more when his right foot plunged in a rabbit
hole and he was pitched headlong into the tamarisks
below. Their boughs bent under his weight, but
they were tough, and he caught at them, and just saved
himself from rolling over into the black water.
He picked himself up and began to rub his twisted
ankle. And at that instant, in a lull between
two gusts, his ear caught the sound of splashing,
yet a sound so unlike the lapping of the driven tide
that he peered over and down between the tamarisk
boughs.
“Hullo there!”
“Hullo!” a voice answered.
“Is that someone alive? Here, mate for
Christ’s sake!”
“Hold on! Whereabouts are you?”
“Down in this here cruel water.”
The words ended in a shuddering cough.
“Right hold on for
a moment!” Taffy’s ankle pained him, but
the wrench was not serious. The cliff shelved
easily. He slid down, clutching at the tamarisk
boughs which whipped his face. “Where are
you? I can’t see.”
“Here!” The voice was not a dozen yards
away.
“Swimming?”
“No I’ve got a water-breaker can’t
hold on much longer.”
“I believe you can touch bottom there.”
“Hey? I can’t hear.”
“Try to touch bottom. It’s firm
sand hereabouts.”
“So I can.” The
splashing and coughing came nearer, came close.
Taffy stretched out a hand. A hand, icy-cold,
fumbled and gripped it in the darkness.
“Christ! Where’s a place to lie
down?”
“Here, on this rock.”
They peered at each other, but could not see.
The man’s teeth chattered close to Taffy’s
ear.
“Warm my hands, mate there’s
a good chap.” He lay on the rock and panted.
Taffy took his hands and began to rub them briskly.
“Where’s the ship?”
“Where’s the ship?”
He seemed to turn over the question in his mind,
and then stretched himself with a sigh. “How
the hell should I know?”
“What’s her name?” Taffy had to
ask the question twice.
“The Samaritan, of Newport,
brigantine. Coals she carried. Ha’n’t
you such a thing as a match? It seems funny to
me, talkin’ here like this, and me not knowin’
you from Adam.”
He panted between the words, and when
he had finished lay back and panted again.
“Hurt?” asked Taffy after a while.
The man sat up and began to feel his
limbs, quite as though they belonged to some other
body. “No, I reckon not.”
“Then we’d best be starting.
The tide’s rising. My house is just above
here.”
He led the way along the slippery
foreshore until he found what he sought, a foot-track
slanting up the cliff. Here he gave the sailor
a hand and they mounted together. On the grass
slope above they met the gale and were forced to drop
on their hands and knees and crawl, Taffy leading
and shouting instructions, the sailor answering each
with “Ay, ay, mate!” to show that he understood.
But about half-way up these answers
ceased, and Taffy, looking round and calling, found
himself alone. He groped his way back for twenty
yards, and found the man stretched on his face and
moaning.
“I can’t . . . I can’t!
My poor brother! I can’t!”
Taffy knelt beside him on the soaking
turf. “Your brother? Had you a brother
on board?”
The man bowed his face again upon
the turf. Taffy, upright on both knees, heard
him sobbing like a child in the roaring darkness.
“Come,” he coaxed, and
putting out a hand, touched his wet hair. “Come.”
They crept forward again, but still as he followed
the sailor cried for his drowned brother, up the long
slope to the ridge of the headland, where, with the
light-house and warm cottage windows in view, all
speech and hearing were drowned by stinging hail and
the blown grit of the causeway.
Humility opened the door to them.
“Taffy! Where have you been?”
“There has been a wreck.”
“Yes, yes the coast-guard
is down by the light-house. The men there saw
her before she struck. They kept signalling till
it fell dark. They had sent off before that.”
She drew back, shrinking against the
dresser as the lamplight fell on the stranger.
Taffy turned and stared too. The man’s
face was running with blood; and looking at his own
hands he saw that they also were scarlet.
He helped the poor wretch to a chair.
“Bandages: can you manage?”
She nodded, and stepped to a cupboard. The sailor
began to wail again like an infant.
“See above the temple
here: the cut isn’t serious.”
Taffy took down a lantern and lit it. The candle
shone red through the smears his fingers left on the
horn panes. “I must go and help, if you
can manage.”
“I can manage,” she answered quietly.
He strode out, and closing the door
behind him with an effort, faced the gale again.
Down in the lee of the light-house the lamps of the
coast-guard carriage gleamed foggily through the rain.
The men were there discussing, George among them.
He had just galloped up.
The Chief Officer went off to question
the survivor, while the rest began their search.
They searched all that night; they burned flares
and shouted; their torches dotted the cliffs.
After an hour the Chief Officer returned. He
could make nothing of the sailor, who had fallen silly
from exhaustion or the blow on his head; but he divided
his men into three parties, and they began to hunt
more systematically. Taffy was told off to help
the westernmost gang and search the rocks below the
light-house. Once or twice he and his comrades
paused in their work, hearing, as they thought, a cry
for help. But when they listened, it was only
one of the other parties hailing.
The gale began to abate soon after
midnight, and before dawn had blown itself out.
Day came, filtered slowly through the wrack of it
to the south-east; and soon they heard a whistle blown,
and there on the cliff above them was George Vyell
on horseback, in his red coat, with an arm thrown
out and pointing eastward. He turned and galloped
off in that direction.
They scrambled up and followed.
To their astonishment, after following the cliffs
for a few hundred yards, he headed inland, down and
across the very slope up which Taffy had crawled with
the sailor.
They lost sight of his red coat among
the ridges. Two or three Taffy amongst
them ran along the upper ground for a better
view.
“Well, this beats all!” panted the foremost.
Below them George came into view again,
heading now at full gallop for a group of men gathered
by the shore of the creek, a good half-mile from its
mouth. And beyond midway across the
sandy bed where the river wound lay the
hull of a vessel, high and dry; her deck, naked of
wheelhouse and hatches, canted toward them as if to
cover from the morning the long wounds ripped by her
uprooted masts.
The men beside him shouted and ran
on, but Taffy stood still. It was monstrous a
thing inconceivable that the seas should
have lifted a vessel of three hundred tons and carried
her half a mile up that shallow creek. Yet there
she lay. A horrible thought seized him.
Could she have been there last night when he had drawn
the sailor ashore? And had he left four or five
others to drown close by, in the darkness? No,
the tide at that hour had scarcely passed half-flood.
He thanked God for that.
Well, there she lay, high and dry,
with plenty to attend to her. It was time for
him to discover the damage done to the light-house
plant and machinery, perhaps to the building itself.
In half an hour the workmen would be arriving.
He walked slowly back to the house,
and found Humility preparing breakfast.
“Where is he?” Taffy
asked, meaning the sailor. “In bed?”
“Didn’t you meet him?
He went out five minutes ago I couldn’t
keep him to look for his brother, he said.”
Taffy drank a cupful of tea, took
up a crust, and made for the door.
“Go to bed, dear,” his
mother pleaded. “You must be worn out.”
“I must see how the works have stood it.”
On the whole, they had stood it well.
The gale, indeed, had torn away the wire table and
cage, and thus cut off for the time all access to
the outer rock; for while the sea ran at its present
height the scramble out along the ridge could not
be attempted even at low water. But from the
cliff he could see the worst. The waves had
washed over the building, tearing off the temporary
covers, and churning all within. Planks, scaffolding everything
floatable-had gone, and strewed the rock with matchwood;
and a marvel to see-one of his two heaviest
winches had been lifted from inside, hurled clean
over the wall, and lay collapsed in the wreckage of
its cast-iron frame. But, so far as he could
see, the dovetailed masonry stood intact. A
voice hailed him.
“What a night! What a night!”
It was old Pezzack, aloft on the gallery
of the light-house in his yellow oilers, already polishing
the lantern panes.
Taffy’s workmen came straggling
and gathered about him. They discussed the damage
together but without addressing Taffy; until a little
pock-marked fellow, the wag of the gang, nudged a mate
slily and said aloud
“By God, Bill, we can
build a bit you and me and the boss!”
All the men laughed; and Taffy laughed
too, blushing. Yes; this had been in his mind.
He had measured his work against the sea in its fury,
and the sea had not beaten him.
A cry broke in upon their laughter.
It came from the base of the cliff to the right:
a cry so insistent that they ran toward it in a body.
Far below them, on the edge of a great
boulder which rose from the broken water and seemed
to overhang it, stood the rescued sailor. He
was pointing.
Taffy was the first to reach him!
“It’s my brother! It’s my
brother Sam!”
Taffy flung himself full length on
the rock and peered over. A tangle of ore-weed
awash rose and fell about its base; and from under
this, as the frothy waves drew back, he saw a man’s
ankle protruding, and a foot still wearing a shoe.
“It’s my brother!”
wailed the sailor again. “I can swear to
the shoe of en!”