Dan Merrithew

by Lawrence Perry

The ship was yawing again. Tongues of flame reached hungrily for them, licking above Dan's red-gold hair and his back, but never touching the girl. Then the swing of the vessel and the wind again; then the fire and the torturing heat. Once Dan saw his grandfather's vessel burning as he had often pictured it in boyhood, and he trembled horribly for a second, but only for a second; then he became rigid and smiled at the apparition. The girl had evidently fainted; she hung a dead weight upon his arm. Again the wind drove the flames far out over the stern.

There came a time when the fight for life was waged mechanically, when all sense of thought vanished, and the carrying on of the struggle came down to mere animal instinct. At such times a brave man need not be ashamed to die—the time has long elapsed when cravens perish. But the very brave, the physically as well as mentally brave, fight on to the end, instinctively. And so Dan fought. He knew that Virginia Howland hung on his arm—but the fire had gone from his ken; he was fighting something, that was all he knew, or cared, since it was for her. Once the red sheet enveloped them for a flashing second, but the merciful wind came to save. It could not last long, though. Dan's arm weakened about the limp form of the girl. He closed his eyes and ground his teeth and brought new force to the encircling arm. He glared down at the mass of soft hair scattering over his breast; he thought of that beautiful life and quite impersonally asked himself if all this beauty must die. Where would all the beauty of the world be then? This question ran deliriously through his mind. Eh! where would it all be? If they died together, would they wake together? And the flames came again.

But as they swooped down with redoubled fury he saw almost subconsciously a great tangled litter of wreckage passing beneath him. He uttered a little cry, and with the girl still in his arm he dropped from the ledge. With a sigh of relief he felt the cooling, revivifying water, and the sharp, cold taste of brine in his mouth was like the touch of a new life.

Instinctively he had put his free arm around a section of cargo boom, with a grating caught in the twisted gear. Upon this he pushed and lifted the half-unconscious girl. Then he clambered astride the boom. Thus they drifted, while Dan, his mind slowly clearing, struggled pitifully for full possession of his faculties. He had a dull sense of pain, but the one dominant idea was the girl. Leaning slightly over, he twisted his hand in the folds of her dress lest she slip into the waters. The stars were paling; on the horizon were the first vague hints of dawn. He gazed at the faint gray curtain with interest. It was a dawn he had not expected to see, he told himself.

Then, as he looked, a shape arose before his eye out of the gloom. Dan watched it with dumb fascination. Suddenly a realizing sense of the nature of the apparition shot through his mind. A vessel—God! Dan's voice raised in a long, hoarse cry for assistance. But there was no answer. Yet the craft was bearing toward them, not a hundred yards away, silently as a ship of the dead. Dan cried again, rising on his rolling perch. But the hail died on his lips. He could see now. It was a ship of the dead. It was the derelict they had viewed from the fancied security of the Tampico's deck, a few short hours before. An imprecation trembled upon Dan's lips. For the last half-hour Virginia, who had crawled to a kneeling posture, had been watching Dan with unlighted eyes. Now as he turned to her and pointed at the slowly advancing vessel, she nodded slowly, as though comprehending his meaning, and stretched out her arms to him.

Softly, quietly the bow of the hulk slid up and nuzzled gently among the wreckage. Quickly Dan secured the litter to the bow by twisting a length of wire cable through the rusty green fore-chains of the derelict. Then gaining a footing in the mess of gear, he assisted the girl to her feet on the tottering grating, and placed her hand on the chains.

"Hold here tight," he said. She nodded, and Dan looked about for the easiest way to the deck. It was not difficult to find. The end of the jib-boom had dropped into the water, making an easy incline, and the foremast had also fallen over the bow and was directly alongside. Both were covered with sections of canvas and a maze of gear and rigging.

Dan clambered up, and then, lying flat across the bowsprit and the mast, he put his arms under the girl's shoulders and literally pulled her to his side. Hand in hand they slowly worked their way up among the wreckage to the deck.

And there with the dawn beginning to glow rosily far on the eastern rim of the slaty waste the girl sighed and sank to her knees; and Dan, his head reeling with sleep and exhaustion, sank also. When the darkness had all gone and the sun had cleared the horizon, the first level rays flooded the sullen deck of a gray-green hulk, sodden, desolate, and fell upon the faces of a man and woman sleeping, her head resting on his shoulder, strands of her dark hair lying across his face.