ON THE KITTIWINK
When Hal left Snug Haven, he bent his shoulders to the storm and with his suit-cases plowed through the gathering dusk toward Hadlock’s Cove.
Cold, slashing rain and boistering gusts left his wrath uncooled. Ugly, brutalized, he kept his way past the smithy—past Laura’s house, and so with glowering eyes on into the evening that caught and ravened at him.
The sight of Laura’s house filled him with an access of rage. That calm security of shaded windows behind the rain-scourged hedge seemed to typify the girl’s protection against him. He twisted his mouth into an ugly grin.
“Think you’re safe, don’t you?” he growled, pausing a moment to glower at the house. “Think I can’t get you, eh? I haven’t even begun yet!”
In the turmoil of his mind, no clear plan had as yet taken form. He knew only that he had a boat and full supplies, that from him the ocean held no secrets, that his muscles and his will had never yet known defeat, and that the girl was his if he could take her.
“She’ll turn me down cold and get away with it, will she?” he snarled. “She will—like hell!”
Forward he pushed again, meeting no one, and so passed Geyser Rock, now booming under the charges of the surf. He skirted a patch of woods, flailed by the wind, and beyond this turned through a stone wall, to follow a path that led down to the cove. On either side of the path stretched a rolling field, rich with tall grasses, with daisies, buttercups, milfoil and devil’s paint-brush, drenched and beaten down in the dusk by the sweep of the storm.
Louder and more loud rose, fell, the thunders of the sea, as Hal approached the rocky dune at the far side of the field—a dune that on its other edge sank to a shingle beach that bordered the cove.
To eastward, this beach consolidated itself into the rocky headland of Barberry Point, around which the breakers were curving to hurl themselves on the shingle. The wind, however, was at this point almost parallel with the shore. Hal reckoned, as he tramped across the field, that with good judgment and stiff work he could get the Kittiwink to sea at once.