The Flying Death - Samuel Hopkins Adams (story reading .txt) 📗

Before the dream had fairly enchained him Colton was buffeted back to consciousness by a slamming of doors and a general bustling about in the house. He sat up in bed, and looked out over the ocean just in time to see a fiery serpent writhe up through the blackness and thrust into the clouds a head which burst into wind-driven fragments of radiance, before the vaster glory of the lightning surrounded and wiped it out.

“A wreck, I fear,” said Professor Ravenden in the hall outside. “I shall go down to the shore, in case I can be of assistance.”

“Indeed you shall not!” came a quick contradiction from the room at the end of the hall. “Not until I’m ready to go with you.”’

It was the voice of the Vision. Colton observed that, soft as the tones were, a certain quality of decisiveness inhered in them.

“Can’t Mr. Haynes bring you?” suggested the professor mildly. “I see a light in his room.”

“He’ll have his hands full with Helga. Please wait, Dad. I won’t be ten minutes.”

From downstairs rose a banging of doors, a tramping of feet and the gruff voice of Johnston, the host, mingled with the gentle remonstrances of his wife, in which a certain insistence upon rubber hoots was discernible. On the other side of Colton there was a swishing and thumping, as of one in hasty search for some article that had declined to stay put. “Where the devil is that sweater?” came in a sort of growling appeal to whatever Powers of Detection might be within hearing.

“Don’t swear, Mr. Haynes,” sounded in tones of soft gaiety from the end room, and the sweaterless one responded: “The half of it hath not been told you. Got a sweater to lend a poor man with a weak chest, Miss Ravenden?”

“I’m just getting into my one and only garment of the kind,” was the muffled answer.

A second woman’s voice, low, but with a wonderful, deep, full-throated sonance in it, broke in:

“My dream has come true,” it said gravely. “The ship is coming in on Graveyard Point. How long, Petit P�re?”

“With you in a minute, Princess. Just let me get into my boots,” returned the voice of the seeker, but so altered by a certain caressing fellowship that Colton was half-minded to think he heard a new participant.

“Are you dressed already, Helga?” demanded Miss Ravenden. “How do you do it?”

“I hadn’t undressed, Dolly,” said the other girl, gravely. “I knew—I felt that something –-”

She paused.

“Helga’s dreams always come to pass, you know,” said the man of the elusive sweater half banteringly. “What infernal kind of a knot has that shoe lace tied itself into?”

“Pray God this dream doesn’t come to pass,” said the girl outside, under her breath as she passed Colton’s door.

Another rocket and a third pierced the night and the response came, in a rising glow of light from the beach. “The lifesavers are at hand,” observed the professor below. “Make haste, daughter. If we are–-”

A burst of thunder drowned him out.

“This,” said Colton with conviction, as he dove into his heavy jersey jacket and seized a cap from a peg, “is going to be a grand place for an insomnia patient! I can see that, right at the start.”

As he ran out of his door he collided violently with a small, dark, sinewy man who had hurriedly emerged from the opposite room.

“Don’t apologise, and I won’t,” said Colton as they clutched each other. “My name is Colton. Yours is Haynes. May I go to the shore with you? I don’t know the way.”

“Apparently you don’t know the way to the stairs,” returned the other a trifle tartly. Looking at his keen, pallid and deeply lined face, the young doctor set him down as a rather irritable fellow, and suspected dyspepsia. “Everybody will be going to the beach,” he added. “If you follow along you’ll probably get there.”

“Thanks,” said Dick undisturbedly. It was a principle of his that the ill-temper of others was no logical reason for ill-temper in himself. In this case his principle worked well, for Haynes said with tolerable civility:

“You just came in this evening, didn’t you?”

“Yes. I seem to have met the market for excitement.”

By this time they had reached the large living-room, where they found Mrs. Johnston presiding with ill-directed advice over the struggles of her grey-bearded husband to insert himself into a pair of boots of insufficient calibre.

“Twenty-five years of service in the life-savin’ corps an’ ain’t let to go out now without these der-r-r-ratted contraptions!” he fumed.

A splendid, tawny-haired girl in an oilskin jacket stood looking out into the night, her eyes vivid with a brooding excitement. She turned as Haynes came in.

“Are you ready, Petit P�re? I’m smothering in these things.”

Expressively she passed her hands down along the oilskins, which covered her dress without concealing the sumptuous beauty of her young figure.

Filled as was Colton’s mind with the image of another face, he looked at her with astonished admiration. Such, thought he, must have been the superb maids in whose inspiration the Vikings fought and conquered.

“If you knew what a gallant wet-weather figure you make,” Haynes answered her (Colton wondered how he could ever have thought the face disagreeable, so complete was the change of expression), “your vanity would keep you comfortable.”

“Dinna blether,” returned the girl, smiling with affectionate comradeship, and slipping her arm through his to draw him to the door. “Father’s boots are on at last.”

“We’re to have company,” said Haynes. “Mr. Colton—I think you said your name was Colton—wants to come along.”

“I’m sorry that you should have been awakened,” said the girl, turning to him. “You don’t mind rough weather?”

“At least I’m not likely to blow away,” returned the young man good-humouredly, looking down at her from his six-feet-one of height. Inwardly he was saying: “You are never the daughter of that weather-beaten old shore man and that mild and ancient hen of a woman.”

Haynes, who had caught up a lantern and was moving toward the door, turned and said to him: “You had better keep between Mr. Johnston and myself. What are you waiting for?”

“Aren’t there others coming? I thought I heard someone upstairs speak of it.” He paused in some embarrassment, as he realised the intensity of his own wish to see that dark and lovely face again.

“Oh, Dolly Ravenden. Her father will bring her,” said Miss Johnston. “We shall meet them at the beach.”

With heads bent, the four plunged out into the storm. The wind now was blowing furiously, but there was little rain. Over the sea hung a black bank of cloud, from which spurted great charges of lightning. Colton, implicitly following his guides, presently found himself passing down a little gully where the still air bore an uncanny contrast to the gale overhead. Hardly had they entered the hollow when Haynes checked himself.

“Did you hear it?” he said in a low voice to the girl.

Colton saw her press closer to her companion, shudderingly. She poised her head, staring with great eager, sombre eyes, into the void above.

“When haven’t I heard it, in my dreams!” she half whispered.

“There!” cried Haynes.

“Yes,” said the girl. “To seaward, wasn’t it?”

On the word, Colton, straining his ears, heard through the multiform clamour of the gale aloft the same faint, strange, wailing note of his earlier experience, not unlike the shrieking of metal upon metal, yet an animate voice, infinitely melancholy, infinitely lonely.

“It chills me like a portent,” said Helga.

“Never mind, Princess,” reassured Haynes, in his caressing voice. “It was stupid of me to say anything about it, and make you more nervous.”

“Nervous! I never knew I had nerves—until now.” She turned to Colton.

“Did you hear it too?”

“Yes. What was it?”

A furious flurry of the gale intervened. The girl shook her head. Johnston in the lead now turned to climb a grassy knoll, and conversation became impossible.

At the top they came in view of a score of busy figures outlined sharply against a lurid background as the lightning spread its shining drapery from horizon to zenith. Presently the four people from Third House stood on the cliff overhanging the sledge-hammer surf, and watched the lifesaving crews of two stations, Bow Hill to the east, Sand Spit to the west, play their desperate game for a hazard of human lives. Straining their eyes, they could discern, in the whiteness of the whipped seas, a dull, undefined lump, which ever and anon flashed, like a magician’s trick, into the clean, pencilled outlines of a schooner, lying on her beam ends, and swept by every giant comber that rolled in from the wide Atlantic. She lay broadside to the surges, harpooned and held by the deadly pinnacled reef of Graveyard Point.