A little further on I left them and turned into the dunes. As they waved farewell, Sipes called out cheerily, “You c’n travel anywheres ’round ’ere now without git’n’ burnt!”
Later, from far away over the sands, I could faintly hear:
“Shipmates, shipmates, ever since we was boys—
Sharing each other’s sorrows, sharing each other’s joys!”
One night I encased myself in storm-defying raiment and went down to the shore to contemplate a drama that was being enacted in the skies.
Swiftly moving battalions of stygian clouds were illuminated by almost continuous flashes of lightning. Heavy peals of thunder rolled through the convoluted masses, and reverberated along the horizon. The wind-driven rain came in thin sheets that mingled with the flying spray from the waves that swept the beach. The sublimity of the storm was soul stirring and inspiring. I plodded for half a mile or so along the surf-washed sand to the foot of a bluff on which were a few old pines, to see the effect of the gnarled branches against the lightning-charged clouds.
A brilliant flash revealed a silhouetted figure with gesticulating arms. It was Holy Zeke. His battered plug was jammed down over the back of his head, and his long coat tails were flapping in the gale. The apparition was grotesque and startling, but seemed naturally to take its place in the wild pageant of the elements. It added a note of human interest that seemed strangely harmonious.
I did not wish to intrude on him, or allow him to interfere with my enjoyment of the storm, but passed near enough to hear his resonant voice above the roar of the wind.
He was in his element. He had sought a height from which he could behold the scourging of the earth, and pour forth imprecations on imaginary multitudes of heretics and unbelievers. With fanatic fervor he was calling down curses upon a world of hopeless sin. Hatred of human kind was exhaled from his poisoned soul amid the fury of the storm.
To his disordered imagination, any unusual manifestation of nature’s forces was an expression of Divine wrath. Condemnation was now coming out of the black vault above him, and the vengeance of an incensed Diety was being heralded from on high. Unregenerate sinners and rejectors of Zeke’s creed were in the hands of an angry God. The scroll of earth’s infamy was being unrolled out of the clouds. “The seventh vial” was being poured out, and the hour of final damnation was at hand.
In the armor of his infallible orthodoxy, like Ajax, he stood unafraid before the lurid shafts. Serene in his exclusive holiness he was immune from the fiery pit and the shambles of the damned, and gloried in the coming destruction of all those unblessed with his faultless dogma.