Neither he nor the May ever saw dry land again. Only Code of the whole ship’s company struggled ashore on the Wolves, bruised and half dead from exposure.
The end of the old log before him was full of poignant tragedy to Code, the tragedy of his own life, for it was the unwritten pages from then on that should have told the story of a fiendishly planned revenge upon him who was totally innocent of any wrong-doing. The easy, weak, indulgence of the father had grown a crop of vicious and cruel deeds in the son.
CHAPTER XXII
A RECOVERED TREASURE
For five days Code yawned or rushed through the greater part of Nat’s stock of lurid literature. It was the one thing that kept him from falling into the black pit of brooding; sometimes he felt as though he must go insane if he allowed himself to think. He had not the courage to tear aside the veil of dull pain that covered his heart and look at the bleeding reality. He was afraid of his own emotions.
It was impossible for him to go lower in the scale of physical events.
Nat was about to triumph, and Code himself was forced to admit that this triumph was mostly due to Nat’s own wits. First he had stolen Nellie Tanner (Code had thought a lot about that ring missing from Nellie’s hand), then he had attached the Charming Lass in the endeavor to take away from him the very means of his livelihood.
Then something had happened. Schofield did not know what it was, but something evidently very serious, for the next thing he knew Nat had crushed 190 his pride and manhood under a brutal and technical charge of murder.