Five minutes later he opened a door looking out over
the black sea, bracing his arm against it. The
wind tore in, beating his whitening beard over his
shoulders, and with it came a deluge of rain that
drenched him as he stood there. He forced the
door shut and faced Alan, a great, gray ghost of a
man in the yellow glow of the oil lamp.
From then until dawn they waited. And in the
first break of that dawn the long, black launch of
Olaf, the Swede, nosed its way steadily out to sea.
The wind had died away, but the rain continued, torrential
in its downpour, and the mountains grumbled with dying
thunder. The town was blotted out, and fifty
feet ahead of the hissing nose of the launch Alan
could see only a gray wall. Water ran in streams
from his rubber slicker, and Olaf’s great beard
was dripping like a wet rag. He was like a huge
gargoyle at the wheel, and in the face of impenetrable
gloom he opened speed until the Norden was
shooting with the swiftness of a torpedo through the
sea.
In Olaf’s cabin Alan had listened to the folly
of expecting to find Mary Standish. Between Eyak
River and Katalla was a mainland of battered reefs
and rocks and an archipelago of islands in which a
pirate fleet might have found a hundred hiding-places.
In his experience of twenty years Ericksen had never
known of the finding of a body washed ashore, and
he stated firmly his belief that the girl was at the
bottom of the sea. But the impulse to go on grew
no less in Alan. It quickened with the straining
eagerness of the Norden as the slim craft leaped
through the water.
Even the drone of thunder and the beat of rain urged
him on. To him there was nothing absurd in the
quest he was about to make. It was the least
he could do, and the only honest thing he could do,
he kept telling himself. And there was a chance
that he would find her. All through his life
had run that element of chance; usually it was against
odds he had won, and there rode with him in the gray
dawn a conviction he was going to win now—that
he would find Mary Standish somewhere in the sea or
along the coast between Eyak River and the first of
the islands against which the shoreward current drifted.
And when he found her—
He had not gone beyond that. But it pressed upon
him now, and in moments it overcame him, and he saw
her in a way which he was fighting to keep out of
his mind. Death had given a vivid clearness to
his mental pictures of her. A strip of white
beach persisted in his mind, and waiting for him on
this beach was the slim body of the girl, her pale
face turned up to the morning sun, her long hair streaming
over the sand. It was a vision that choked him,
and he struggled to keep away from it. If he
found her like that, he knew, at last, what he would
do. It was the final crumbling away of something
inside him, the breaking down of that other Alan Holt
whose negative laws and self-imposed blindness had
sent Mary Standish to her death.
