When she had fallen asleep, I slung my lantern over my arm and scampered off to the Rat Hole to yarn with the twins, making what speed I could in the fog and untimely dusk, and happy, for the moment, to be free of the brooding shadow in our house. The day was not yet fled; but the light abroad—a sullen greyness, splashed with angry red in the west, where the mist was thinning—was fading fast and fearfully. And there was an ominous stirring of wind in the east: at intervals, storm puffs came swirling over the hills from the sea; and they ran off inland like mad, leaving the air of a sudden once more stagnant. Fresh and cool they were—grateful enough, indeed, blowing through the thick, dead dusk—but sure warning, too, of great gusts to come. We were to have weather—a gale from the northeast, by all the lore of the coast—and it would be a wild night, with the breakers of Raven Rock and the Thirty Black Devils leaping high and merrily in the morning. As I ran down the last hill, with an eye on the light glowing in the kitchen window of Skipper Tommy Lovejoy’s cottage, I made shift to hope that the old man had made harbour from Wolf Cove, but thought it most unlikely.
He had.
“You got home, Skipper Tommy,” I cried, shouldering the door shut against a gust of wind, “an’ I’m glad o’ that! ’Tis goin’ t’ blow most awful, I’m thinkin’.”
My welcome was of the gloomiest description. I observed that the twins, who lay feet to feet on the corner-seat, did not spring to meet me, but were cast down; and that Skipper Tommy, himself, sitting over the fire with a cup of tea on the table at his elbow, was glum as a deacon.
“Oh,” said he, looking up with the ghost of a laugh, “I got in. You wasn’t frettin’ about me, was you, Davy? Oh, don’t you ever go frettin’ about me, lad, when—ah, well!—when they’s nothin’ but fog t’ fear. Sure, ’twasn’t no trouble for me t’ find North Tickle in the fog. Ah, me! If ’twas only that! Sure, I bumped her nose agin the point o’ God’s Warning, an’ rattled her bones a bit, but, lad, me an’ the punt is used t’ little things like that. Oh, ay,” he repeated, dismally, “I got in.”
Evidently the worst had happened. “Did you?” said I, blankly. “An’ was you—was you—cotched?”
“Is you thinkin’ o’ she, Davy?” he answered. “Well,” in a melancholy drawl, smoothing his stubble of grey beard, his forehead deeply furrowed, “I’m not admittin’ I is. But, Davy,” he added, “she cast a hook, an’—well, I—I nibbled. Yes, I did, lad! I went an’ nibbled!”
One of the twins started up in alarm. “Hark!” he whispered.
We listened—but heard nothing. A gust of wind rattled the window, and, crying hoarsely, swept under the house. There was nothing more than that.