“Coming out of the candle-light, I blinked like a flittermouse. The sky was still a keen blue, with the snow whirling and glittering and dancing; but the light was dying, and I guessed it would be about half-past four—the hands of the school-house clock were fast frozen to its face. I turned up the blacksmith’s alley to get a shovel: it was smooth to the eaves with snow, and little wisps and curls played on the surface like smoke. The wind was blowing big guns intermittently, and in the intervals I could hear the thunder of the Spit. I set out for the station, and in a dozen yards was up to my waist in a river of snow.
“There was a windmill before you came to the station. There’s one yet, but it’s a dummy—a sailing-mark for ships, and the Board of Trade looks after it. It worked in those days, and belonged to a fellow called Rhodes. I was a strongish chap, you must know, not so tall as Willie Harverson, but as broad, or thereabouts; but by the time I reached the mill I was glad enough of its shelter. And then I looked up, and backed away again. The sail-shutters were open, and the wind screamed through them; but the gearing—all those cranks and elbows about the pin—that had gone; and two or three blades of the steering-fan hummed like bits of ribbon in the wind. The whole thing had swung round like a weathercock, and the heavy top storey rocked and lifted, like a mouth opening and shutting. Underneath it a man was lying on his back in the snow, watching it as if it were a plaything.
“I shook him and bawled in his ear. He didn’t speak. His face glittered all over with ice particles, and I knew who he would be by his hair and eyes. I dragged him out from under the toppling mill; by his mouth I could make out that he was saying something about ‘my people,’ and I nodded, and shouted, ‘What about Portsannet?’
“I made out a few words: ‘Twice—oars broke—old boat—help.’ And then I asked, ‘What about the station?’ It seemed Reuben was helpless. The mast and cones and drums had gone; he’d been firing, but we hadn’t heard, and he was waiting for dark to signal with the rockets. ‘D’ye know what boat?’ I shouted, putting my arm round his neck and my mouth at his ear; and he tried two or three times to tell me, but had lost his voice. He stooped down and wrote in the snow with his finger, ‘SN, 102.’ Seeing that that was the Lizzie’s number, I didn’t bother about Reuben and the station. I collared him, and off we blundered into the drifts between Rhodes’s mill and South Ness.
“They were much as I’d left them when Osa and I got to the ‘Dotterel.’ The tall Johnnie Faw wouldn’t touch brandy, I remember. The two women were not to be seen. I told them to stir themselves, and they were on their feet in an instant. John Broadwood, who had said she could never live round the Spit, was first at the door. ‘Out o’ the road, ye farmers!’ he grunted; and I was for telling Osa to go into the kitchen to his wife, when all at once I saw Lizzie in the doorway. ‘Reuben’s signalled, then?’ she said; and somebody said ‘Ay.’ The gipsy woman didn’t take her eyes off Osa, who was talking to Nunan in the Romany; but she didn’t speak.”
* * * * *
He stopped for so long that we thought he wasn’t going on again. It was minutes before he resumed; but evidently he had got his digression over within himself, for he went straight on.
* * * * *
“There were lights and moving figures down by the boat-house, but they were blotted out from time to time: the night had fallen. The cobles and craft were huddled close in, and they were tossing and hissing and groaning—fenders grunting and rubbing on wood, blocks banging, tackle shrieking, parted ropes cracking like whips.... The little jetty seemed to run out a yard or two into the night. The surf thundered out on the Spit, a deep solemn sound. A fellow was bawling through a trumpet: his voice sounded throttled, something like a bassoon. The moon wasn’t due up for a couple of hours yet.
“We ran her down on the carriage,—men at the wheels and life-lines and at the horse’s heads,—and then we stood in the knee-deep water to see her lift. She lifted, and every man flung himself headlong out of the way. She came up from the carriage in a monstrous cant, and then she came down broadside in the broken, boiling wave. I heard the snapping of the port oars,—it was a short crackle in the tempest,—and then I was thirty yards away, scrambling among the carriage and horses and men. A broken shaft danced up and down in the white backwash.