Honor of Thieves: A Novel

by Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne

The cyclone blew on, bellowing and tearing, and the fiends’ fingers of the wind did mischief beyond all reckoning. Timber which had stood hundreds of years, ceibas and cypresses, live oaks and pines, sprawled down amongst the tangled undergrowth, mere masses of splintered matchwood. The mangrove thickets were clogged with stones, with grasses, with gray tangles of Spanish moss. Lakes were licked from their beds and spirted far over the creaming waters of the Gulf. The land birds were driven like helpless spume-flakes far away to sea, and choked with the gale before they were flung breathless from its clutches. The palmetto-shucks of the humbler coast-dwellers vanished in dust. The frame houses of the better-to-do burst at all their angles, and spread like platforms upon the ground.

And meanwhile the great straggling, wooden hotel on Point Sebastian dissolved away like a sandbank in a flooded estuary. First the heat-twisted shingles had been stripped off, flying away into the wind like some strange dark fowl sent as avant-couriers of more fearsome things to come. Then weather-boards followed, singly and in coveys; then gable-ends and joists and rafters; all floating and pitching in the air as though the wind had the density of a tossing ocean stream. Chairs and wooden bedsteads, clothes blown out into grotesque shapes, as though the freakish spirits of the storm had donned them, the scantling of the long piazzas, and still more boards, whirred out into the night and vanished for ever down the track of the cyclone. And in the thick of this devil’s bombardment crouched men and women, and other things, shapeless and horrible, which had been men and women once. The tale of the dead grew with awful pace that night.

Once there was a slight lull in the blast of the gale, and the driven-out waters of the shore began to return, and swirled knee-high about the two who were taking refuge at the foot of the pile.

“Come,” said Onslow, taking the girl by the hand, “we must run for it.” And he led the way beachwards, blundering through piled up mounds of wreckage, whilst the stinging spindrift swirled around their heads and bit them upon the face like whips. But a flying missile from out of the inky blackness struck him on the curve of the temple before he had gone with her twenty yards, and the grip of his fingers loosened, and he swayed and fell without a word. The girl threw herself on his body, wailing that he was killed and that she too would stay there and die; but a wild hope seized her that he might be only stunned, and she took his body in her arms, and half dragging, half carrying, began to go with him once more by tedious inches towards the beach.

Then the cyclone burst out afresh with all the torrent of its fury, and to move or even stand against the wind was a thing impossible. The girl and her burden were flung heavily to the ground, and a mass of driving wreckage slid above them and pressed them down. “Oh, Pat, Pat,” she cried, “I did so want to live with you, and now we must both die here.”

Three terrible hours more they spent there, the girl expecting violent death to fall on her every next second, the man in her arms gradually returning to consciousness. And then, like an organ whose wind-chamber has emptied itself, the cyclone suddenly dropped its voice. It had arisen in a minute to the full of its strength, and in a single minute it lulled to a breathless calm, leaving the air scoured and sweet, and the land a tangled desert. The sea alone remembered its lashing actively, and fumed in a swell of sullen majesty in its deeper parts, and sent its angry waters back in rippling surf on to those shallow western beaches from which it had been so ruthlessly evicted.

It was from this last returning tidal wave that the final danger came, but the two under that pile of wreckage managed to slip from beneath the wood when the waters loosened it, and run in the breaking dawn to the higher ground beyond. They were bruised, both of them, and Onslow was bleeding from a jagged cut on the head; but after all, their hurts were trifling compared with what they might have been. Three thousand people died in that night’s work amongst the Southern States; and the air was torn with the moan of those who were left, lamenting as they sought their dead.

That day all who could lift a pair of hands had work to do, and the next, and the next; but on the fourth day from the cyclone, when the fallen had been buried and the quick housed, Onslow managed for the first time to get a word en tête-à-tête with this woman who had said she loved him and had promised to be his wife. He had conned the matter over in his mind, and after heavy argument had decided not to hold any of his affairs secret from her; this of course having particular reference to the one affair by which he hoped to make a competence. He had visions of difficulties with her over it, but he began his confidence artfully.

“Elsie,” he said, “I came here to Florida on business.”

“Then,” replied Miss Kildare, “I’d like to give business a knob of sugar to eat and flowers to wear on his headstall. What color was business? White?”