And after that, what? He did not know. No definite idea existed in that half-crazed, passion-scourged brain. The driving power of his strength accursed, took no heed of anything but flight. Away, away, only to be away!
“God!” he panted, stumbling up the dune to its top, where salt spray and stinging rain skirled upon him in skittering drives. He dropped his burdens, and flung out both huge arms toward the dark, tumbling void of waters, streaked with crawling lines of white. “God! that’s what I want! That’s what they’re trying to keep me away from! I’m going to have it now—by God, I am!”
He stood there a moment, his oilskin hat slapping about his face. At his right, three hundred yards away or so, he could just glimpse the dark outlines of Jim Gordon’s little store that supplied rough needs of lobstermen and fishers. Hal’s lip curled with scorn of the men he knew were gathered in that dingy, smoky place, swapping yarns and smoking pipes. They preferred that to the freedom of the night, the storm, the sea! At them he shook his fist.
“There’s not one of you that’s half the man I am!” he shouted. “You sit in there and run me down. I know! You’re doing it now—telling how gramp had to pay because I licked a bully, and how I’ve got to apologize! But you don’t dare come out into a night like this. I can outsail you and outfight you all—and to hell with you!”
His rage somehow a little eased, he turned to the task immediately confronting him. The beach sloped sharply to the surf. A litter of driftwood, kelp and mulched rubbish was swirling back and forth among the churning pebbles that with each refluent wave went clattering down in a mad chorus. Here, there, drawn up out of harm’s way, lay lobster-pots and dories. Just visible as a white blur tossing on the obscure waters, the Kittiwink rode at her buoy.
“Great little boat!” cried Hal. A vast longing swept over him to be aboard, and away. The sea was calling his youth, strength, daring.
Laura? And would he go without the girl? Yes. Sometime, soon perhaps, he would come back, would seize her, carry her away; but for now that plan had grown as vaguely formless as his destination. Fumes of liquor in his brain, of passion in his heart, blent with the roaring confusion of the tempest. All was confusion, all a kind of wild and orgiastic dream, culmination of heredity, of a spirit run amok.
Night, storm and wind shouted to the savage in this man. And, standing erect there in the dark, arms up to fleeing cloud and ravening gale, he howled back with mad laughter:
“Coming now! By God, I’m coming now!”