Burned Bridges

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.