CHAPTER X
The wind had died away, but the rain continued, torrential in its downpour, and the mountains grumbled with dying thunder. The town was blotted out, and fifty feet ahead of the hissing nose of the launch Alan could see only a gray wall. Water ran in streams from his rubber slicker, and Olaf’s great beard was dripping like a wet rag. He was like a huge gargoyle at the wheel, and in the face of impenetrable gloom he opened speed until the Norden was shooting with the swiftness of a torpedo through the sea.
In Olaf’s cabin Alan had listened to the folly of expecting to find Mary Standish. Between Eyak River and Katalla was a mainland of battered reefs and rocks and an archipelago of islands in which a pirate fleet might have found a hundred hiding-places. In his experience of twenty years Ericksen had never known of the finding of a body washed ashore, and he stated firmly his belief that the girl was at the bottom of the sea. But the impulse to go on grew no less in Alan. It quickened with the straining eagerness of the Norden as the slim craft leaped through the water.
Even the drone of thunder and the beat of rain urged him on. To him there was nothing absurd in the quest he was about to make. It was the least he could do, and the only honest thing he could do, he kept telling himself. And there was a chance that he would find her. All through his life had run that element of chance; usually it was against odds he had won, and there rode with him in the gray dawn a conviction he was going to win now—that he would find Mary Standish somewhere in the sea or along the coast between Eyak River and the first of the islands against which the shoreward current drifted. And when he found her—
He had not gone beyond that. But it pressed upon him now, and in moments it overcame him, and he saw her in a way which he was fighting to keep out of his mind. Death had given a vivid clearness to his mental pictures of her. A strip of white beach persisted in his mind, and waiting for him on this beach was the slim body of the girl, her pale face turned up to the morning sun, her long hair streaming over the sand. It was a vision that choked him, and he struggled to keep away from it. If he found her like that, he knew, at last, what he would do. It was the final crumbling away of something inside him, the breaking down of that other Alan Holt whose negative laws and self-imposed blindness had sent Mary Standish to her death.
Truth seemed to mock at him, flaying him for that invulnerable poise in which he had taken such an egotistical pride. For she had come to him in her hour of trouble, and there were five hundred others aboard the Nome. She had believed in him, had given him her friendship and her confidence, and at the last had placed her life in his hands. And when he had failed her, she had not gone to another. She had kept her word, proving to him she was not a liar and a fraud, and he knew at last the courage of womanhood and the truth of her words, “You will understand—tomorrow.”
He kept the fight within himself. Olaf did not see it as the dawn lightened swiftly into the beginning of day. There was no change in the tense lines of his face and the grim resolution in his eyes. And Olaf did not press his folly upon him, but kept the Norden pointed seaward, adding still greater speed as the huge shadow of the headland loomed up in the direction of Hinchinbrook Island. With increasing day the rain subsided; it fell in a drizzle for a time and then stopped. Alan threw off his slicker and wiped the water from his eyes and hair. White mists began to rise, and through them shot faint rose-gleams of light. Olaf grunted approbation as he wrung water from his beard. The sun was breaking through over the mountain tops, and straight above, as the mist dissolved, was radiant blue sky.
The miracle of change came swiftly in the next half-hour. Storm had washed the air until it was like tonic; a salty perfume rose from the sea; and Olaf stood up and stretched himself and shook the wet from his body as he drank the sweetness into his lungs. Shoreward Alan saw the mountains taking form, and one after another they rose up like living things, their crests catching the fire of the sun. Dark inundations of forest took up the shimmering gleam, green slopes rolled out from behind veils of smoking vapor, and suddenly—in a final triumph of the sun—the Alaskan coast lay before him in all its glory.
The Swede made a great gesture of exultation with his free arm, grinning at his companion, pride and the joy of living in his bearded face. But in Alan’s there was no change. Dully he sensed the wonder of day and of sunlight breaking over the mighty ranges to the sea, but something was missing. The soul of it was gone, and the old thrill was dead. He felt the tragedy of it, and his lips tightened even as he met the other’s smile, for he no longer made an effort to blind himself to the truth.
Olaf began to guess deeply at that truth, now that he could see Alan’s face in the pitiless light of the day, and after a little the thing lay naked in his mind. The quest was not a matter of duty, nor was it inspired by the captain of the Nome, as Alan had given him reason to believe. There was more than grimness in the other’s face, and a strange sort of sickness lay in his eyes. A little later he observed the straining eagerness with which those eyes scanned the softly undulating surface of the sea.