The Isle of Retribution

by Edison Marshall

He thought upon this matter as he lay in the soft snow whence the descending branches of the tree had hurled him. He didn’t have many seconds to think about it. Further eccentricity on the part of Bess swiftly gave him additional cause for reflection. She had not only cried out, but she ran to him with the speed of a deer. She was by his side almost before he was aware of the scope of the accident.

The sobbing cry he had heard could very likely be attributed merely to that instinctive horror that a sensitive girl would feel at an impending tragedy, wholly apart from personal interest in the victim; but for a few seconds Ned was absolutely at a loss to explain that drawn, white, terrified face above him. In fear for him, Bess was almost at the point of absolute collapse herself. Nor could mere impersonal horror explain her flying leap to reach his side,—like a snowbird over the drifts. It meant more than mere forgiveness for the terrible pass to which he had brought her. In a few seconds of clear thinking he thought he saw the truth: that even after all that was past Bess still looked to him for her hope, that she regarded him still as her defense against Doomsdorf; and that his death would leave her absolutely bereft. He was a man, and she still dreamed that he might save her.

The result was a quick sense of shame of his own inadequacy. It is not good to know oneself a failure in the face of woman’s trust. Yet the effect of the little scene was largely good, for it served to strengthen Ned’s resolve to spare the girls in every way he could, and by his own feigned hope to keep them from despair. Above all, he found an increased admiration for Bess. Instead of a silly prude, a killjoy for the party, she had shown herself as a sportswoman to the last fiber. She had been a friend when she had every right to be an enemy; she had shown spirit and character when women of lesser metal would have been irremediably crushed. He was far away now from the old barriers of caste. There was no reason, on this barren, dreadful isle, why he shouldn’t accept all the friendship she would give him and give his own in return.

But this subject was only one of three that suddenly wakened him to increased mental activity. If he were amazed at Bess, he was no less amazed at himself. He had been tired out, hopeless, out of wind, hardly able to swing his arms, and yet he had managed to leap out of seeming certain death. The unmistakable inference was that the body in which his spirit had dwelt for thirty years had strength and possibilities of which hitherto he had been unaware. In the second of crisis he had shown a perfect coördination of brain and muscle, an accuracy of transmission of the brain-messages that were conducted along his nerves, and a certain sureness of instinct that he had never dreamed he possessed. It would have been very easy to have jumped the wrong way. Yet he had jumped the right way—the only possible way to avoid death—choosing infallibly the nearest point of safety and hurling himself directly toward it. Perhaps it would have been better to have stayed where he was, to have let the tree crush the life out of him and be done with Hell Isle for good, yet a power beyond himself had carried him out of danger. The point offered interesting possibilities. Could it be that he had had the makings of a man in him all these years and had never been aware of it? Could he dare hope that this side of him might be developed, in the hard years to come, so that he might be better able to endure the grinding toil and hardship? The thought wasn’t really hope—he didn’t believe that hope would ever visit him again—it was only an instant’s rift, dim as twilight, in the gloom of his despair. The most he could ever hope to do was to fortify himself in order to take more and more of the girl’s hardship upon his shoulders.

Thirdly he gave some thought to the matter of felling trees. It was a more complex matter than he had at first supposed. Evidently he had gone about it in the wrong way. It would pay to have more respect for the woodsman’s science if he did not wish to come to an early end beneath a falling tree. He might not be so quick to dodge again.

Bess was staring wide-eyed into his face; and he smiled quietly in reassurance. “Not hurt at all,” he told her. Quickly he climbed to his feet. “See that you don’t do the same thing that I did.”

Delighted that he had not been hurt but a little aghast at what heart’s secret she might have revealed in running to his aid, she started to go back to her toil. But Ned had already reached some conclusions about tree-felling. He walked with her to her fallen axe, then inspected the deep cut she had already made in her tree.

“You’re doing the same thing I did, sure enough,” he observed. “The tree will fall your way and crush you. Let me think.”

A moment later he took his axe and put in a few more strokes in the same place. It was the danger point, he thought: a deeper cut might fell the tree prematurely. Presently he crossed to the opposite side, signaled Bess out of danger, and began to hack the tree again, making a cut somewhat above that started on the other side of the trunk. He chopped sturdily; and in a moment the tree started to fall, safely and in an opposite direction.

He uttered some small sound of triumph; but it was a real tragedy to have the tree fall against a near-by tree and lodge. Again he had failed to exercise proper foresight.