Into one of those cavernous pits often found at the bottom of Lake Superior—"the shining big sea water" to a poet, perhaps, but a sullen, fear-inspiring ocean to belated mariners—all that remained of the Bannockburn had sunk for ever. She pounded herself to pieces within six hours after striking upon an unknown reef near one of the desolate islands that lie close to the horizon about Whitefish Point. From those pits far beneath waves that are shiveringly cold even in midsummer no ship ever breaks to rise again; and there—like things of ice—human bodies lie intact until the judgment-day.
It was late in November, 1885, during a frightening hurricane that swept suddenly out from over the uninhabited Canadian wildernesses to spread ruin and death along white-duned shores that skirt the bleak, forbidding forests of northern Michigan.
A week later, a little woman with gold-brown hair and big sleepless eyes slipped once more into the marine office in Detroit, as the door opened to give exit to a messenger. She had come many times before. There was pathetic hopelessness in the glance she gave the clerk; the agony of the hours that had passed since the Great Storm had stripped her cheeks of colour and furrowed them with lines of suffering. She had come so often that now her lips were parted in what might have been the beginning of an apologetic smile had not the misery in her heart destroyed it. The clerk turned his head and his heart throbbed a little faster as the office stenographer lifted toward the inquirer her eyes that were filled with the intense sympathy of woman for woman. He went back and leaned over a ledger, leaving the little woman standing silently outside the barred window. One of his duties was to give the news of tragedy, to tell of storm and shipwreck, of men lost and vessels saved—to bring happiness and to break hearts; but he could not bring himself to do it now. He heard the stenographer rise from her chair, and knew that she was going to the window.
"Have—you heard of the Bannockburn?"
The woman's voice barely rose above a whisper. For an instant there was intense longing in her eyes; then, as the office girl hesitated, struggling with the truth, hope shot into them with almost the gleam of madness.
"No, dear, we haven't," said the girl softly. "I mean—nothing definite. She was sighted off Grand Island just as the storm began, but—she hasn't been seen at the Soo."
The clerk, poring over the ledger, heard the stenographer swish past him into the next room. He knew why. He turned and looked at the little woman, who stood with her face bowed in her hands just outside his window. This was not a strange sight, for it had happened many times during the past few days; usually the tragic news had not been received so quietly.
Those were the days just after the Great Storm that comes once each year. It comes in the days of late navigation, November or December, when men and ships of the Inland Seas face a thousand perils in their mad dashes from port to port through ice and snow. Never has it been known to fail. And the one just past had raged with unprecedented fury for seventy-two hours. From end to end of the lakes it had swept until not one of the five escaped the destruction it wrought. Now the stories of the tragedies were coming in over the wires, to be disseminated among owners and the friends and relatives of the men whom they hired.
Since early morning the clerk in the marine office had been busy answering questions. There was a lull when the little woman came. But now, as she stood sobbing quietly, an aged man, bent and hobbling, and with snow-white hair touching his shoulders, stumbled up and inquired in a cracked, trembling voice for news of his son's ship. She was safe in port, and he hobbled away, mumbling with hysterical gladness. A young woman, just behind him, with a little boy's hand clasped tightly in her own, whispered for the fiftieth time for word of a wooden ship upon which her husband had sailed. One after another they came, and silently the little woman stood aside from them, unseeing and unhearing, until a woman brushed past her sobbing aloud.
Instinctively she put out a hand, and the two white tear-wet faces met. Both were young; sympathy glowed in their eyes. She whose husband had gone with the Bannockburn spoke first.
"No—no—no!" sobbed the other. "Thank God, they've heard! He's safe— safe! See this."
She held something out for the other to read. It was a telegram. But the little woman's blurred eyes could not see. She reached out and flung her arms blindly around the other's neck, and kissed her. Then she went forth into the storm.
The city was smothered in the damp grey chill of a windy, sleet-filled night, and in the face of it the Bannockburn Widow—for by reason of a custom of the lakes such poor unfortunates are sometimes known by the names of their husband's ill-fated ships—passed up from the river, and mingled with the hurrying, home-bound throngs that were pouring forth from the shops. She seemed neither to see nor to hear; with blinded eyes turned to the slippery pavement she ran into other pedestrians, until the breath was half jostled out of her; a loiterer, ensconced in the shelter of a doorway, caught the prettiness of her face, and brushed up to her side with a raised umbrella. But he was unnoticed. Without once looking ahead, the woman continued through the sleet. Only by her homing instinct was she led in the right direction, across the car-cluttered square, from under the feet of carelessly driven horses, and up the narrow, alley-like street that passed her home. So far as thoughts of herself were concerned, her mind was a blank. One thing alone seemed to fill it—a vision of a coast of rock, with the sea roaring against it, and a black forest behind, and in the midst of the hissing spume a ship being beaten to pieces. She had seen that coast of rock. Only that summer she had passed it on the vacation trip which her husband had given her. He had pointed out the pictures upon them, which had given them the name, Pictured Rocks; and she had shuddered when he told her stories of ships that had gone ashore there.
"Some day I may go up against 'em myself, Nell," he had laughed. And she had laughed with him. As the memory of it came to her, she moaned aloud.
In front of a little cottage she paused. A small lamp burned dimly in one of the windows, and the Bannockburn Widow strained her eyes to peer through into the room. After a few moments of silent watchfulness she slipped like a shadow up the board walk to the narrow steps, and tapped gently upon the door. It was cautiously opened, and an elderly woman's face peered out at her. For an instant the eyes of the two met, and the one who had opened the door stood back speechless while the other entered.
The elder woman nodded. She tried to speak, but her lips seemed frozen. While the other was taking off her drenched garments she drew a shawl about her head, paused at the door a moment, stammered good night, and hurried to her own home.
The sailor's young wife fell upon her knees beside a ragged, upholstered chair, and buried her face in her arms. Her gold-brown hair had become loosened, and fell in a damp, shining mass down her back. For a long time she might have been in a swoon; but the fires of her suffering were burning madly in her brain. All they produced were pictures, pictures, pictures; bursting seas meeting cavernous rocks with the tumult of thunder, a ship battling in a maelstrom of reef and spume, the black forest bending in shrieking blasts and always somewhere in this terrible scene a human face! And this face became larger and nearer and more real to her, until its lips seemed to move in speech; and out of the ghastly grey mists of her mental fantasm a hand reached and beckoned, beckoned until she flung herself back with a shriek.
A child's half-sleeping cry answered, and the woman sprang to her feet, and stood, almost without breathing, clutching the edge of the chair and listening. The cry did not come again. On tiptoe the woman went until she could peer into a darkened room, where two little forms lay huddled in the middle of a bed.
As silently she stole back again. A pencil and a tablet lay upon the table. Upon the tablet she wrote:
"Ben is wrecked on the Pictured Rocks. I've gone to help him. Please care for the children until I come back."
Then she put on her water-soaked coat and hat, and went again out into the storm of the night, led on by the pictures in her brain.
They were becoming more and more distinct now. With each passing moment she saw them clearer; and she knew that her duty was defined and indubitable. It seemed a long time afterward that she came down into the crashing tumult of shunting engines and the glare of a score of fiery eyes that lighted up the sooty drizzle of the station yards. The pictures left her brain for a time as she picked her way among them. The dazzling headlights seemed like orbs of fire. Bewildered, she stumbled over tracks and ties, until at last a trainman seized her by an arm and piloted her to safety. Then the pictures came back, and she forgot that she had been lost and in danger. She asked questions, but none of those who answered them saw aught but the misery of some passing misfortune in her face. Strangers looked at her pityingly, the ticket agent curiously, and when she passed the gateman her white face was bowed and hidden.
So she went into the train. The yards, with their inferno of blazing eyes and clanging bells, slipped behind unnoticed, the glow of the city melted away, and to the little widow the hours and miles swept past in meaningless procession.
Toward dawn she fell into what might have been sleep had it not been for the pictures. Her head rested upon her arm, and for a long time she lay crumpled up in her seat, starting now and then like one in a nightmare when her mental visions became too exciting. When she straightened herself and looked out into the world again the sun was shooting fleeting rays through the grimy window. Deep black forests had taken the place of city and farmland; here and there a woodman's shanty came into view; and through the open car door came the redolent perfume of the pine wilderness.
This had been home to her once. It had been life to her, a life which she would not have bartered for the choice of a million others—until there came the man who afterward turned sailor. The odour of the pine was an old friend. It reached down into her soul and wrenched her free from the brain-pictures which were maddening her, and she struggled to her feet and went to the car door, and stood there listening and seeing and smelling, while a flush gathered in her cheeks and her eyes glowed with the warm beauty that made people love them. Somewhere in this big wilderness she had been a girl; somewhere in it the little farm of the old folks was buried; somewhere—somewhere—in it—she had met the man. The old thoughts returned to her. The pictures came, one, and two, and three, until in their number and hurry they crowded and crushed one another, and drove the Bannockburn Widow back to her seat with a white drawn face on which was stamped all the misery and hopelessness in life.
It was noon when the train ran into the little wilderness station near the white capped run of Superior. As the woman came out, she saw the black sweep of the lake over the tops of a thousand wind-wrought dunes beyond the shanty that was called a station, and on its uttermost edge, where the grey gloom of the sky seemed to reach down into the sombreness of the lake, her eyes caught the faint smoke of a southbound freighter.
The sight of it fascinated her. As she stepped down from the car, she failed to notice the curious glances of men and boys whose daily diversion was meeting the train. In her head the pictures seemed to burst into flame, a heating, maddening fire that filled her with a desire to shriek aloud to the ship which was a thing almost out of her vision. But those who watched her saw nothing of the trouble in her brain. She went slowly down among the dunes, and then to the edge of the lake; and along that she trailed, bent and searching, until the purple shadows of the beach-pines wrapped her from the following of human eyes. None knew whence she came; none could guess whither she was going. An old lumberman said that a squatter back in the woods was expecting his wife from the south. But few believed that this was the woman. And in the end the most curious of them all, a small boy, dived off into the woods to discover things for himself. It was late when he came back. The lake was shrouded in cold foggy gloom; the rising night-winds were whistling in the pines; away off in their depths sounded the lone, hungry cry of a wolf; and the woman, the boy said, was miles away—with her face still turned to the peopleless barrens of the Indian cliffs.
Once she had looked back and seen the boy, but she had not thought of calling him. After a time she knew that she stumbled because she could not see, and that an opaque curtain had shut her in until the lake and the forest might have been another world. But the night held no terrors for her; so she kept on. The lone wolf howled up in the edge of the forest; a flight of belated wild fowl whistled over her head; a quavering, thrilling cry came nearer and nearer from the blackness of the land, the night-wind came colder and stronger; the bursting of the lake among tumbled rocks became more and more tumultuous, but the little Bannockburn Widow was unmindful of them all. The Indian cliffs were ahead. Each step brought her nearer to them, and each moment she could see her husband's ship more distinctly. Now it had ceased its struggles in the seas; its shattered remnants lay among the rocks. Among them she saw human things, some dripping and creeping, some drowned and still; and when she thought that she heard their voices, crying faintly for help, she stopped and listened.
"Ben!" she called. "Ben! Oh, Ben!"
She fancied she heard a reply, and called again. The wolf slunk farther behind; two little fiery dots that were levelled at her from the edge of the forest disappeared; the night, too, grew suddenly quiet, and only the noise of the lake drowned the voices of those human things staggering up from the wreck in the woman's brain. It suddenly occurred to her that she must hurry or they would get away from her. So she ran. When she stopped running she fell. For hours after that the pictures were gone, the sounds of the night passed unheard, the lone wolf howled and sniffed almost at her feet, and the lake lashed itself in futile fury against the face of the Pictured Rocks.
When she awoke, the sun was shining upon her. She did not sense the passing of time. The night had gone without reckoning, and she began the search where she had left off, only now there were no human things creeping and dying in her visions. If a hunter had seen her, he would have known that she was weak and footsore. But she was not conscious of hunger or fatigue. Rather than this, a strange content was growing in her; she had reached the Pictured Rocks. The lake was rolling and thundering against them, and she knew that very soon she would find her husband. Hour after hour she went on. She thought that she had travelled far, but the rocks she had left in the morning were in sight at noon. Now she seemed much nearer to them. She came to a break in the great stone cliffs, and down there in the white sand at their base she thought that she saw men. There was one lying white and naked in the sun, with the water creeping up about him at every roll of the lake. She knew now that her search was at an end.
She called aloud in her joy as she half crept, half fell, down through the fissure in the cliff. With outstretched arms she stumbled to the edge of the beach. The white thing had been drawn back by a receding wave, and was just out of her reach. It was an oar.
"Ben!" she pleaded. "Ben, my darling!"
She waded out to her knees, and met the oar as it came in again. With a scream she snatched it and fell with it upon the sand. After a little she held it out and looked at it, her eyes dazzling in the joy of triumph. Silently she clutched the thing to her breast and slowly made her way up the ragged breach in the rocks. It was a tiresome climb, but she held to her precious burden. When she had reached the summit she staggered back toward the gloom of the forest, mumbling incoherently. But through it ran one strain.
That day a coatless, uncovered sailor looked longingly out from the island that lay just beyond sight of Whitefish Point. It was a desolate and uninhabited area of drifting sand and ragged pines, surrounded on all sides by the ugly grey run of the sea. No other object in the dreary scene betrayed a sign of life. Nearly doubled under the weight of a bundle clasped in his arms, his feet wrapped in trailing rags, he stumbled slowly along. His eyes were deep-sunk, his face starved to the thinness of a death-mask, and he mumbled incoherently to the bundle he held. Slowly the figure turned and trailed back among the low, pine-covered sand-dunes, and as it disappeared, like a tottering old man, another living thing came up from the edge of the water. It was not unlike the first in the gauntness of starvation, but this man was naked to the waist and his feet were bare and bloodstained. He was older, but more powerful, and as he gazed up to where a shirt fluttered at the top of a dead pine he showed his teeth in a snarl and cursed. Then he, too, took up the trail into the dunes.
Deep in them and sheltered somewhat from the cold wind of the sea, the first man gently laid his bundle down in a shelter made of pine boughs. As he pulled back the coat he had wrapped about it he smiled, a ghastly enough smile had it not been for the love-light that shone in his sunken eyes. The man's movements exposed the face of a sleeping boy who could not have been more than five years old. He put the coat back again and turned to the figure approaching through the dunes. "His-s-st!" he warned, holding up a hand that shook like one of the pine-cones above him.
"T' hell with yer hissin'!" growled the other. "Cap'n, I want th' grub—an' I'm damned if I ain't goin' t' have it."
"There isn't any more grub," said the smaller man. "I gave it all to the little one."
He picked up a few dry sticks from the sand and piled them on a fire that was burning near the pine-bough shelter. In his companion's eyes smouldered a dangerous madness. A few yards from the shelter he fell upon his hands and knees and like a hungry animal crawled toward the sleeping child. The starving captain staggered to intercept him and grovelled upon all fours in his path.
"I said there isn't any more!"
Like two human creatures in an animal pantomime the men glared, while their emaciated faces almost touched. There was a deadly challenge in the little man's red eyes. He supported himself on his knees and one arm, while the other arm was raised, like a cat's, ready to scratch at the yellow, hair-hung visage of the man he defied.
After a moment the sailor settled back on his haunches with a crackling laugh and glanced furtively at a stick just out of reach. Streaks of blood had dried on his naked chest and arms, and over one of these he licked his tongue, smacking his lips in an ecstatic grimace. There was something terribly suggestive in the leering look of the man as he nodded toward the pine-bough shelter. He came a foot nearer on his hands and knees, but the captain crouched weakly, his teeth gleaming like half-drawn ivory knives ready to bury themselves in human flesh. The other paused again.
"Honest as God!" replied the smaller man, and as the other turned away again, the captain went back to sit down in front of the pine-bough shelter. For a few minutes the half-stripped sailor lay in the sand, burying his arms and shivering. Then he crawled up and huddled close to the fire. The other suffered in grim silence, staring out fixedly against the wilderness of lifeless sand-dunes, and slowly his reason slipped beyond his control and the drifted heaps seemed to take a thousand fantastic shapes and fill the air until they walled him in. After a time they settled again and were peopled with a score of romping children, among whom was a rosy boy with a tiny ship trailing at the end of a string. Behind them all was a woman, who smiled over their heads and down at him. The man crooned and beckoned to the woman and the child until something pulled at his arm, and the sailor crept between him and his vision.
The captain dragged himself back to consciousness with a start. His first instinct was to crouch back in an attitude of preparedness; his second to glance hastily in the shelter where the coat-wrapped bundle still lay as he had placed it. In a vague sort of way he felt that he had something to fear, and he turned his cavernous eyes in a sullen, suspicious look at his companion.
"I've got a plan," said the sailor. With a trembling forefinger he drew a circle in the sand. "We'll both start here—at the end of th' island. You go one way, me th' other. Mebby we'll find a clam."
He pulled himself to his feet and stood swaying like a drunken man. With an effort the captain stood up. He piled a few more sticks on the fire and then the two men staggered off through the dunes. The little man's weakness was overpowering. In a moment of delirium he fell upon the sand and hunted for tracks. "They were here—they were here—" he moaned monotonously. "God—God—they were here—they were here——" He dug his way up the side of the dune that crumbled away under him as be kicked and clutched in it with his hands and feet. Again and again he rolled back exhausted, his eyes and mouth filled with sand. Fighting his way weakly, inch by inch, he crawled at last to the top of the dune, and with an unheard cry flung his arms above his head and turned his gaunt face up to the cold, grey vastness of the sky. Then he pitched forward and like a dead thing rolled down the other side of the dune. With a powerful effort he concentrated what was left of his mind and, at times stumbling along on his feet, at others creeping upon his hands and knees, toiled through the drifting sand until he came to the edge of the lake along which the searching sailor was crawling like a snail. In the west, day was going out in a sickly yellow gleam. The starving man turned his face toward it and trailed close down to the water's edge watching hungrily for something that would give him life. He forgot to measure time as he worked. One minute—ten—an hour passed. He failed to notice that he had made less than a hundred fathoms. On bleeding hands and knees he still crept along, resting now and then, sometimes even in the freezing wash of the sea. The glow burned out of the sky, and now up through the gloom of the twisting sand-dunes came the sailor.
"Nothing—nothing——" he groaned wearily. "Oh, God, nothing—nothing— nothing——"
The little man stood up beside him and together the two gazed out upon the grey waste of water that was dissolving itself in the gathering darkness of night. After a moment the captain's chin fell upon his chest, and his eyes searched the sand at his feet. Suddenly he gave a cry and fell upon his face, sobbing, laughing and raving in his madness until the other drew back in horror. For a few moments he lay very quiet, and during those moments the captain fought to re- establish his reason, while with both hands he clutched a tiny mussel to his breast. When he came to his knees he held the precious shell out for the sailor to see. The eyes of the latter burned with a maniacal fire. He approached like a thing half human and fell upon his companion, tearing and scratching with the viciousness of a eat. "Gi' me it—gi' me it!" he cried.
The two rolled over and over in sickening combat. The great hands of the starving sailor caught at the other's throat and held there until the face went black and the captain opened his mouth like a strangling fish. By chance he freed himself, and using the clam for a weapon dug its sharp edge deep into the sailor's naked chest. Inside the captain's shirt was treasured a pistol. In their smothering embrace he reached for it, and his arm was pinioned. An instant later the sailor's hand came in contact with a small stone and with it he rained blow after blow upon the little man's head. Under them the captain sank like a dead man and lay crushed beneath the body of his enemy. He was conscious of a flow of warm blood pouring over his face and he knew that he must be terribly wounded. His hand touched the revolver butt and with a supreme effort he twisted the muzzle upward and exhausted all of his dying strength in a pull upon the trigger. There followed a smothered explosion, and the sailor lurched back and pressed his hands to his stomach. A moment more and he toppled over upon the sand, kicking and sobbing in the agonies of death, while the victor lay very quiet, with blood soaking his hair and beard and forming a pool under his face.
Darkness had fallen thick and cold over the sea when the captain raised his head. He seemed to be awakened from his death-sleep by the crying of a child. Groaning, he struggled to rise, and failing in this he dragged himself foot by foot toward the dead pine from which floated the signal of distress. That pine had been in his mind for a day and a night. He had figured that his last duty would be the sending up of a pillar of flame that might call a ship to his little son whom he would leave when he died. They had burned a tree each night. This would be the last. On his stomach he wormed his way toward it, and again and again he attempted to raise his voice in response to the wails of the child coming from among the dunes. After a little it seemed to the wounded man that the sounds were nearer. Frantically he strove to reach the pine. The light of it would bring to him the only living thing he had saved from his ship, and he prayed and sobbed in his weakness as he came nearer and nearer to it. He was bleeding profusely again and knew that he had only a few minutes more before him. His last progress was made by inches. At the base of the pine he had only strength enough left to strike a match and light the pile of cones. Then he rolled upon his face again as the flames began licking their way up the resinous tree.
Somewhere in the man there rose and battled the last call to life. It struggled with his desire to die, and conquered by bringing him back into the agony of existence. He heard the crackling of flames over his head much as he might have listened to the murmuring of the sea on a peaceful night of a happier day. He possessed no fear, no pain, and his one desire was that he might rest in peace. But the spirit of life dragged him out of the valley of contentment and opened his ears again to the crying of the child. His consciousness found him in a blaze of light. The pine was a roaring torch reaching up a hundred feet in the air. Its heat had burned his face and scorched his hair, but this gave him no additional pain. He was almost sightless, but life gave him power to see the child. More like a wounded animal than a man he dragged himself toward his son. In terror the boy saw the strange thing approaching in the fiery glare, and his screams of fear brought reason back into the captain's brain. He stopped, and gasped out a cry that sent warm blood trickling down his face. A final tremendous effort brought him to his feet, an unhearing, unseeing creature struggling with the death-grip, and praying for a few moments more. He staggered on and on until he knew that he had been recognized and that the terror-stricken child was running into his arms. Then he collapsed. In one hand the man still clutched the precious clam. He opened it now with his teeth and gave it to the child. He tried to speak, but the life of his tongue seemed gone.
The captain turned his face once more to the sea. The lights of a ship were coming up out of the naked vastness of Superior. He lay down quietly and passed into a deep trance, and when the men came they found him with the little breathing thing at his side, cold in the slumber from which no man awakes.
Two graves were soon made, but there were none to identify either the occupants or the little child. Eventually the rescuers learned from the boy that his name was "Jim," but where he lived or who he might be remained unknown. So when Captain Falkner left the little waif at an orphanage on the Erie shore the boy was registered as James Falkner— lacking a better name—and his relatives believed him to have perished with his father on the Bannockburn.
