Like surf on a rock, the waves spouted over some dim floating object that bulked large. Richard Cary saw the wan flicker and curl of them. He put out an arm to fend himself off. His hand slipped along the edge of a board. He groped again and caught hold of a massive upright. Painfully he hauled himself up on a platform of boards awash with the sea. There he sprawled flat.
Soon he was able to sit and maintain his grasp of the upright which was firmly fastened to the platform. He could breathe and rest, although the water gushed over him. Reaching up, he touched the rim of the galleon bell. It vibrated to the strokes of the heavy tongue as the platform tossed and pitched with a motion giddily violent.
His refuge was the roof of the wooden forecastle house which had been torn bodily from the bolts securing it to the Valkyrie’s deck. Loosened by the collision, it had been carried down and later brought to the surface by its own buoyancy, perhaps not until after the boats had abandoned the search for their lost captain.
A haunted bell, but one that could be kind as well as cruel. Twice now it had preserved Richard Cary from the immediate certainty of extinction. He clung to his wave-washed raft with the bell clanging over him, but he had ceased to despair of rescue. He was granted a surcease from the unavailing struggle to survive. He dared hope to see another blessed dawn. With clearing weather and a falling wind, he might hang on and keep alive for two or three days. Other castaways had done so with much less pith and endurance than his own.
Meanwhile the galleon bell, riding in its frame, would be a conspicuous beacon by day. At night its brazen-throated appeal would carry far over the face of the waters.
His courage was hardened, the spark of confidence rekindled, and he felt strong in the faith that this was not to be the end of Richard Cary.
CHAPTER XXIII
THE CASTAWAY
By conventional standards, Jerry Tobin, owner of The Broadway Front on the liveliest street of Panama, was a disreputable person. The queer, turbid world in which he moved had its own rigid standards of appraisal, however, and by these he was rated as a person of solid integrity. He was on the level. This verdict is sometimes denied those who sit in higher and more sanctified places.
In the era before the darkness of prohibition had dimmed the bright lights of his café on the Broadway of Manhattan, he had enjoyed the esteem of politicians, actors, race-track magnates, prize-ring celebrities, and gentleman idlers who respected his opinions and often accepted his judgments.