He put into a bottle-necked cove gained by a passage scarce twenty feet
wide which opened to a quiet lagoon where no wind could come and where
the swell was broken into a foamy jumble at the narrow entrance.
He cooked his supper, ate, watched the sun drop behind the encircling
rim of firs. Then he lay on a cushion in the cockpit until dark came and
the green shore of the little bay grew dim and then black and the dusky
water under the yawl's counter was split with the phosphorescent flashes
of darting fish.
Across a peninsula, on the weather side of the Cape, he could hear the
seas thud and the surf growl like the distant booming of heavy
batteries. Over his head the wind whistled and whined in the firs with a
whistle and a whine like machine-gun bullets that have missed their
mark. But neither of these sounds held the menace of the sounds of which
they reminded him. He listened to those diapasons and thin trebles and
was strangely soothed. And at last he grew sleepy and turned in to his
bunk.
Some time in the night he had a weird sort of dream. He was falling,
falling swiftly from a great height in the air. On the tail of his plane
rode a German, with a face like those newspaper caricatures of the
Kaiser, who shot at him with a trench mortar--boom--boom--boom--boom!
Thompson found himself sitting up in his bunk. The queer dream had given
place to reality, in which the staccato explosions continued. As he put
his face to an open porthole a narrow, searching ray of uncommon
brilliance flashed over his yawl and picked up the shore beyond. Back
of the searchlight lifted the red, green, and white triangle of running
lights laid dead for him. It sheered a little. The brilliant ray blinked
out. He saw a dim bulk, a pale glimmer through cabin windows, heard the
murmur of voices and the rattle of anchor chain running through hawse
pipe. Then he closed his eyes and slept again.
He rose with the sun. Beside him lay a sturdily built motor tug. A man
leaned on the towing bitts aft, smoking a pipe, gazing at the yawl.
Twenty feet would have spanned the distance between them.
Thompson emerged into the cockpit. The air was cool and he was fully
dressed. At sight of the uniform with the insignia on sleeve and collar
the man straightened up, came to attention, lifted his hand smartly in
the military salute--the formality tempered by a friendly grin. Thompson
saw then that the man had a steel hook where his left hand should have
been. Also a livid scar across his cheek where a bullet or shrapnel had
plowed.
"It's a fine morning after a wild night," Thompson broke the
conversational ice.