Sincerely yours
Charles R. Burnham
Chief Engineer
There came a September day when summer lingered in the warm haze and the soft westerly winds. A wanton touch of frost had painted the foliage, here and there, in tints of yellow or crimson. Teresa and Ricardo motored farther than usual nor turned until they reached the seacoast, many miles from Fairfield. A small surf crooned among the weedy rocks or ran hissing up the golden sands. On the distant horizon was a sooty banner of smoke from a steamer’s funnel. A coasting schooner lifted a bit of topsail as small and white as the wing of a gull.
Hand-in-hand, the lovers climbed the nearest headland. While they stood there, the wind veered. Instead of breathing off the land, with the scents of field and woodland, it blew strongly from the eastward. It came sweeping over the salt sea, with a tang and a boisterous vigor unlike the soft airs of the summer that tarried reluctant to depart.
Cool, pungent, it seemed to Richard Cary such a wind as had whipped the Caribbean to foam and pelted the decks with spray when he had joyously faced it upon the bridge of the swinging Tarragona, the wind that long ago had blown the clumsy ships of Devon across to the Spanish Main.
He sighed and brushed a hand across his eyes. Teresa stood with parted lips and face aglow. A long silence and she said:
“I feel it, too, Ricardo. Shall we go south again? Not to Cartagena, but—”
His arm swept toward the south in a gesture large and eloquent as he exclaimed:
“Nor to Cocos Island, Teresa dear. But you and I belong in those seas, somewhere. We have always belonged there. We have been at anchor long enough.”