The Glacier Gate: An Adventure Story

by Frank Lillie Pollock

But for the present he was safe enough, and the ship’s company cherished him like gold. He felt in better health and spirits than for a long time. A new thrill of adventure entered into him. He had been violently wrenched away from the consideration of his own misfortunes, into a dangerous game whose stake might be anything, and his spirit had reacted to it. He thought with vivid anticipation of the tale he would have to tell Eva Morrison when he should at last present his promised report.

He lounged about the Cavite’s decks, trying to kill time, and his mind reverted much to Miss Morrison. He missed her extraordinarily. It was wonderful how, within but a few days, she had come to be a comrade whom it was hard to lose even temporarily. Of course he was not in love with her. In the desperate condition of his affairs it was no time to think of love, much less of marriage. Hard work and hard struggle must be his program for the coming years. And then it crossed his mind that if he recovered his twelve thousand dollars he could really think of love and marriage, too. It would be a very respectable starting capital for a country doctor.

But it was not a middle-aged wreck that Eva Morrison was destined to marry. He was startled at his own chain of thought, and went again to look at Rockett. The defaulter lay motionless, breathing slowly, unchanged in anything. Lang touched the grizzled head that must hold the secret of so much rascality and so much money.

“If you die, you’re dead. If you wake up and talk you’ll be murdered,” he murmured. “Better stay just as you are, my friend.”

He went back to the deck and basked in the fresh, warm sea air and the sun. It was hard to kill time on the Cavite. There seemed to be no books of any sort on board, but finally he discovered a pile of tattered old magazines in the cabin, and languidly turned them over in his deck chair. Every hour or so he visited his patient, without ever discovering any change. He dozed a little in the sun. Carroll and Harding seemed to spend most of the day on the bridge. Floyd disappeared into his cabin; and from time to time he caught sight of Louie prowling about the ship on affairs of his own, silent, secret, venomous.

There was a game of poker in the cabin that night, in which they all took part but Lang, leaving the steamer apparently in charge of the negro crew. Lang watched the game for some time, and went to bed late, but throughout the night he heard fitfully the mutter of voices, the rustle and click of cards and chips, the ring of glasses, and once the sound of a sudden, sharp altercation, which was immediately stilled.

They were a rather weary and heavy-eyed crew at breakfast. Carroll told him afterward that Floyd had won heavily; that he almost always won; that Louie was a bad-tempered loser, and that they always had to take his gun away from him when they played cards.

After breakfast Lang again visited his patient, and methodically took pulse and temperature, recording them on the chart. He looked again into the blind eyes, tested the reflexes, and found no change. He had been turned over, and that was all. Some one visited him periodically, every hour or two, Carroll had said, in hopes of a change, and this had been kept up day and night ever since he came on board.

That day was very much a duplicate of the one before it. The ship’s company left him to himself. Carroll invited him to the bridge, but he did not care for these rum gatherings, and declined, lounging in his deck chair, smoking, meditating. The company gathered for dinner and scattered again; and the Cavite continued to plow forward, at half speed, through ever-bluer seas where porpoises plunged looping, and flights of flying fish glittered past. They were heading nowhere. It was a real yachting cruise after all, Lang thought, complicated with medicine and something like piracy.

It turned hazy toward sunset and they ran into fog. All the same there was poker in the cabin that evening, though to Lang it seemed monstrous that the navigation of the ship should be abandoned to an ordinary sailor in such weather. It was hot and damp; the cabin reeked with whisky and tobacco smoke, and when Lang went on deck about nine o’clock he found the air close and muggy, and so dense with fog that each of the ship’s lights glowed in a cottony ball of vapor.