“T’anks, lady.” Mr. Connors voice was eager.
“But,” continued the warning voice, “the dog will be about all evening, and if you come back——”
“Me come back, lady!” Mr. Connors’ voice trembled with emotion. “Ferget it! Dis is me farewell appearance!”
The lady opened the door a little wider.
“Fido,” she commanded, “come here! Here, Fido! That’s a good little doggie!”
Thirty seconds later Mr. Connors dropped to the ground and disappeared.
Mr. Lewis Copewell resumed consciousness to find himself apparently deserted. With the reawakening of his mental activities came a renewed horror of the situation which engulfed him. He must find a telephone. He struggled to his feet, but while he slept his injuries had been multiplying and his joints stiffening. He breathed with difficulty. Also, he could not walk. One ankle had swollen until his shoe bound it like a vise, and when he stepped forward he fell, with nauseating pain, to the broken rocks.
The following is a true capitulation of the casualties suffered by Mr. Copewell: one broken collar bone; one broken rib; one sprained ankle. Mr. Copewell was not a man of flimsy courage. In order to send a single reassuring word to the lady he loved, he would gladly have waded through blood, but one can not wade successfully through blood on one foot. He could not even walk along a railroad track on one foot. He tried hopping and found it, on the whole, an unsatisfactory means of locomotion. Then Mr. Copewell crawled back to his suit-case and sat down again in despair.
Mr. Lewis Copewell was not astonished that his chance companion should, as it seemed, have abandoned him in his adversity. His meeting with Mr. Connors had been merely casual. Finding himself converted without warning from a voyager bound for the Enchanted Isles where a beauteous maiden awaited him into a wrecked and battered derelict, his course had drifted across that of a second derelict. The second derelict had stood by for a time and offered him some slight aid, then had drifted on, abandoning him to the mercy of winds and tides.
As Mr. Copewell’s harrowed mind dwelt on the analogy of his shipwrecked life he realized that instead of being a friend this black-haired youth was in fact his Nemesis, his evil genius. In the waste places of the sea float dangerous, half-sunken craft that menace the traffic of the ocean lanes. Good ships bear down on these submerged hulks and yawning holes are driven into seaworthy prows. Such a drifting peril was the black-haired youth.