“Sir! Mind your tongue!”
“I’m glad, I tell you!” The boy’s face seemed burning with interior fires, suddenly enkindled. “I quit everything. Give me a boat, gramp—anything that’ll sail—a twenty-five footer, and let me go! I don’t ask you for a dollar. All I ask is a boat. Give me that, and I swear to God I’ll never trouble you again!”
“A boat, Hal? What do you mean, sir?” Startled, the captain peered at him.
“Oh, God!” Hal cried with sudden passion. “A boat—that’s all I want now! I’m dying here! I was dying in college, choking to death by inches!” He stood up, raised his head, and flung his arms towards the sea. He cried from his black heart’s depths:
“Let me go! Oh, let me go, let me go!”
“Go? Go where?”
“Lord, how do I know? All I want is to go somewhere, away from here. This place is cursed! I’m cursed here, and so are you, as long as I’m around!”
“Cursed, Hal?” whispered the captain, tensely. “What gives you that idea?”
“I know it! This village bounded on one side by nothing and on the other by a graveyard—I can’t stand it, and I won’t! Let me go somewhere, anywhere, out to sea, where it’s calling me out over beyond there!” He gestured mightily at the lure of the horizon. “Let me go out past the Silken Sea, beyond the Back of the Wind!”