The Love That Prevailed

by Frank Frankfort Moore

All at once Wesley had a curious feeling that he had seen all that before. The sight of that mighty bulk and the knowledge that it was the heavy ribbed framework of a large ship seemed familiar. But when or how had he seen it?

It was not until Hartwell spoke that he understood how this impression had come to him.

“You see it—there—there—just as he described it to us when he awoke from his trance?” said Hartwell.

And there indeed it was—the fabric of the East Indiaman that had been wrecked years before on the Dog's Teeth Reef, and there was the Dog's Teeth Reef laid bare for the first time within the memory of man!

It was the skeleton of a great ship. The outer timbers had almost wholly disappeared—after every gale for years before some portion of the wreckage had come ashore and had been picked up by the villagers; but the enormous framework to which the timbers of the hull had been bolted had withstood the action of the waves, for the ship had sunk into a cradle of rock that held her firmly year after year. There it lay like the skeleton of some tremendous monster of the awful depths of the sea—the Kraken—a survival of the creatures that lived before the Flood. The three stumps of masts which stood up eight or ten feet above the line of bulwarks gave a curious suggestion to a creature's deformed legs, up in the air while it lay stranded on its curved back.

And the crimson sunset shot through the huge ribs of this thing and spread their distorted shadows sprawling over the sands at the base of the reef and upon the faces of the people who stood looking up at this wonder.

“There it is—just as he saw it in his trance!” said Hal Holmes. “He saw it and related it to us afterward. What are we to say to all this, Mr. Wesley? All that he predicted so far has come to pass. Are we safe in saying that yonder sun will be setting over a blazing world to-morrow?”

“I do not dare to say anything,” replied Wesley. “I have already offered my opinion to Mr. Hartwell, which is that there may be a kind of sympathy between the man and the earth, by whose aid he has been able to discover the whereabouts of a spring in the past and to predict these marvels of tides.”

“That is a diviner's skill derived from the demons that we know inhabit the inside of the earth,” cried Jake Pullsford. “He has ever had communication with these unclean things.”

“That works so far as the tides are concerned,” said the smith. “It stands to reason that the demons of the nether world must know all about the ebb and flow; but how did he foresee the laying bare of yonder secret?” He pointed to the body; of the wreck.