The Isle of Retribution

by Edison Marshall

His accent was plainly not that of an American. He had not been born to the English tongue; very plainly he had learned it, thoroughly and laboriously. His own tongue still echoed faintly in the way he mouthed some of his vowels, and in a distinct purring note, as of a giant cat, in his softer sounds.

Ned observed these things more in an inner mind, rather than with his conscious intelligence. Outwardly he was simply listening to what the man said. The note of dimness and unreality was wholly gone now. The voice was indescribably vivid; the man himself was compellingly vivid too. It was no longer to be wondered at that he had appeared of such gigantic proportions when they had seen him across the snow. In reality he was a giant of a man, about six feet and a half in height, huge of body, mighty of arm and limb, weighing, stripped down to muscle and sinew, practically three hundred pounds. Beside him, Knutsen no longer gave the image of strength.

Even in his own city, surrounded by the civilization that he loved, Ned couldn’t have passed this man by with a casual glance. In the first place there is something irresistibly compelling about mere physical strength. The strength of this man beside the sea seemed resistless. It was to be seen in his lithe motions; his great, long-fingered, big-knuckled hands; in the lurch of his shoulders; in his great thighs and long, powerful arms. He was plainly, as far as age went, at the apex of his strength,—not over forty-one, not less than thirty-eight. He drew up the boat with one hand, reaching the other to help Lenore out on to the shore.

It came about, because he reached it toward Lenore, that Ned noticed his hand before ever he really took time to study his face. It was a mighty, muscular hand,—a reaching, clasping, clenching, killing hand. It crushed the lives from things that its owner didn’t like. On the back and extending almost to the great, purple nails was blond, coarse hair.

But it wasn’t mere brute strength that made him the compelling personality that he was. There was also the strength of an iron purpose, a self-confidence gained by battle with and conquest of the raw forces of his island home. Here was a man who knew no law but his own. And he was as remorseless as the snow that sifted down upon him.

If Lenore’s thought processes had been the same as when she had left her city home, she would have been stirred to envy by his garb. There was little about him that suggested intercourse with the outside world. He was dressed from head to foot in furs and skins of the most rare and beautiful kinds. His jacket and trousers seemed to be of lynx, his cap was unmistakably silver fox. But it came about that neither she nor Ned did more than casually notice his garb: both were held and darkly fascinated by the great, bearded face.

The blond hair grew in a great mat about his lips and jowls. His nose was straight, his eyebrows heavy, all his features remarkably even and well-proportioned. But none of these lesser features could be noticed because of the compelling attraction of his gray, vivid eyes.

Ned didn’t know why he was startled, so carried out of himself when he looked at them. In the first place they were the index of what was once, and perhaps still, a lively and penetrating intelligence. This island man, however mad he might be, was not a mere physical hulk,—an ox with dull nerves and stupid brain. The vivid orbs indicated a nervous system that was highly developed and sensitive, though heaven knew what slant, what paths from the normal, the development took. They were not the eyes of a man blind to beauty, dull to art. He was likely fully sensitive to the dreadful, eerie beauty of his own northern home; if anything, it got home to him too deeply and invoked in him its own terrible mood. They were sardonic eyes too,—the eyes of a man who, secure in his own strength, knew men’s weaknesses and knew how to make use of them.

Yet none of these traits got down to the real soul of the man. They didn’t even explain the wild and piercing glitter in the gray orbs. Whatever his creed was, he was a fanatic in it. An inhuman zeal marked every word, every glance. There is a proper balance to maintain in life, a quietude, most of all a temperance in all things; and to lose it means to pass beyond the pale. This island man was irremediably steeped in some ghastly philosophy of his own; a dreadful code of life outside the laws of heaven and earth. Some evil disease, not named in any work on medicine, had distilled its dire toxin into his heart.

There is no law of God or man north of sixty-three,—and the thing held good with him. But there is devil’s law; and it was the law on which his life was bent.