The Harbor of Doubt

by Francis William Sullivan

These quarters, unlike the pen on the Nettie B., were below the deck, but were lighted by a porthole. 204 The room was larger, had a comfortable bunk, a small table loaded with magazines, a chair, and a sanitary porcelain washstand. The luxury of the appointments was a revelation.

There was no question of his escaping from this room he very soon discovered.

The door was of heavy oak and locked on the outside. The walls were of solid, smooth timber, and the porthole was too small to admit the possibility of his escaping through it. The roof was formed of the deck planks.

He had hardly examined his surroundings when he heard a voice in sharp command on deck, and the running of feet, creaking of blocks, and straining of sheets as sail was got on the vessel. His room presently took an acute angle to starboard, and he realized that, with the fair gale on the quarter, they must be crowding her with canvas.

He could tell by the look of the water as it flew past his port that the remainder of the trip to St. Andrews would not take long. He knew the course there from his present position must be north, a little west, across the Bay of Fundy.

The Nettie B., when compelled to surrender her prisoner, had rounded Nova Scotia and was on the home-stretch toward Quoddy Roads. She was, in fact, less than thirty miles away from Grande Mignon Island, and Code had thought with a great and 205 bitter homesickness of the joy just a sight of her would be.

He longed for the white Swallowtail lighthouse with its tin swallow above; for the tumbled green-clothed granite of the harbor approaches; for the black, sharp-toothed reefs that showed on the half-water near the can-buoy, and for the procession of stately headlands to north and south, fading from sight in a mantle of purple and gray.

But most of all for the crescent of stony beach, the nestle of white cottages along the King’s Road, and the green background of the mountain beyond, with Mallaby House in the very heart of it.

This had been his train of thought when Burns had opened the door to deliver him up to the gunboat, and now it returned to him as the stanch vessel under him winged her way across the blue afternoon sea.

He wondered if the Albatross would pass close enough inshore for him to get a glimpse of Mignon’s tall and forbidding fog-wreathed headlands. Just a moment of this familiar sight would be balm to his bruised spirit. He felt that he could gather strength from the sight of home. He had been among aliens so long!