The Lone Wolf Returns

by Louis Joseph Vance

Lanyard wanted to tell the speaker he was a fool, it was impossible for one to have come through that motor wreck, impossible for any mortal to have been caught between two heavy cars meeting head-on in headlong flight, without incurring desperate if not deadly injuries. How reasonable and true that was this pain proved that racked him from head to foot, but more particularly his head, and made him want to retch, pain so acute it paralyzed the very instinct to complain . . .

His tongue temporarily refusing its office, Lanyard contented himself with a grunt through locked teeth; and because his knees were as water, hung on with both hands to the rounded surfaces that met behind his back to form the angle, till presently the pain grew less, the feeling of nausea passed off, his senses renewed contact with their environment and flashed strange tidings to his brain in respect of conditions they could neither grasp nor accomodate themselves to.

Some moron (he inferred) had taken to amusing himself with the headlights of one of the motor-cars, switching them on and off while they stared Lanyard full in the face at such close range that he was conscious of the heat they generated between the spaces of darkness. Furthermore, a storm of sorts had evidently sprung up out of that clear midnight sky: he remembered well how cloudless it had been just before the collision, how bright with mockery the gibbous moon; the boding calm which had bound everything in Nature he recalled distinctly, too. But now a great wind was shrieking like a warlock, gusts of warm rain spattered the flesh of his face, the very earth beneath him was convulsed, bucking and rocking like a wild mustang, and the keen, sweet smell of the inland night had given place to the salt breath of the sea . . .

Lanyard opened his eyes, only to close them tight the next instant and shut out what indisputably was the delusion of a mind deranged; yet a vision so vividly coloured and in every particular so circumstantial, stamping the retinas with an impression of so much brilliance and animation, that he could not refrain from looking again, if only to convince himself of the sheer wonder of it—but half expecting his sight, on this occasion, to be greeted by another illusion and a different, if one quite as impossibly unreal.

He saw, however, precisely what he had seen, and rejected, before . . .

A length of steamer deck, looking forward from the angle in which he stood at the after end of the superstructure, with deck-chairs all folded and lashed to the inner rail and window-ports all fast; its scoured planking now blue with shadow cast by the deck overhead, now flooded with sun glare from end to end, as the vessel rolled in a rough seaway. Beyond the rail a bright blue sky without a cloud, a horizon unbroken by any loom of land, a sea of incredible ultramarine creaming under the lash of a full gale, the sleek hollow bellies of its charging waves a-dazzle with the sun's spilled gold, its flying spindrift sprays of diamond-dust . . .

Forward, opposite the entrance to the saloon companionway, a girl clinging to the rail, bobbed blonde hair fluffed out by the wind, filmy yellow sweater and brief sports-skirt of white silk moulded to her slender young contours, intent eyes turned aft to Lanyard. In the dark mouth of the door a cluster of men and women, likewise staring. Nearer and a little to the left a lithe young man of British stamp, wearing a look of cheerful concern and the white-duck jacket of a steward, with long legs well apart balancing to the motion of the vessel while he watched Lanyard.

Finding himself the target of the latter's bemused regard, the man grinned broadly. "Nahsty tumble, sir," he cried in the penetrating pitch of a seafarer schooled to talk against the wind, and with an inflexion that suited precisely his racial type—"and a wicked crack it did give your 'ead and no mistike. Like a pistol shot it sounded. Thought for a minute it 'ad done you in for fair, but it didn't take long to mike sure you 'adn't broke' no bones. 'Ow do you feel now, sir?"

"What . . ." Lanyard's voice in his hearing was attenuated and strange. His tongue felt unwieldy. "What? . . ."

The figure in the white jacket waved a hand toward the foot of a ladder nearby. "You was comin' down from the bridge-deck, sir—don't you remember?—when a sea 'it us and knocked you clean off your pins. 'Ad to 'ang on to the rail to keep from bein' knocked abaht myself."