The day was well advanced when Cy Liskard reappeared on the highway of the Lias, and turned the nose of his vessel towards the sea. For an hour he paddled feverishly at a speed that flung even the ebbing tide high against the bows of his little craft.
His destination was definite in his mind. It was a picture that now loomed full of foreboding since the thing he had discovered in his long concealed hiding place. He came to the rockbound landing he knew by heart. He swung his boat out. Then with all the power of his body he struggled with the tide race. Slowly, foot by foot, he gained way. The sturdy vessel nosed into the stream making tremendous leeway. But finally his efforts were rewarded. He drove up to the landing and leapt ashore.
The man had vanished within the narrow entrance to the cavern that lay back in the granite wall of the cliffs. His boat was moored fore and aft to the familiar boulders. The tide race held the moorings taut and wearing upon the harsh surface of the stones. But the little vessel was secure. Soon the last of the ebb would have spent itself, and the period of dead water would relieve the strain.
It was a silent world which the presence of the boat made no impression upon. The air was alive with circling sea-fowl whose mournful note only served to increase the sense of utter loneliness. Grey and bleak the wide expanse of the river mouth looked to be the very gate of Desolation.
An hour had passed since Cy Liskard’s landing. And in that time the sky had changed its aspect from the brilliant light of early fall to the grey overcast which the coming flood was bringing up with it. A ruffle of wind stirred. It came chill and keen off the far ocean, and a few driven raindrops splashed on the bosom of the waters. It was a passing phase. It was that queer atmospheric effort which so much suggests that in every changing of her mood Nature knows the pangs of labour.
Of a sudden the man re-appeared. He came hastily. He came almost as though he were reeling under a physical shock. His soulless eyes were strangely alight. They were frigidly ablaze with a light that transformed them into a furious expression of the mind behind them. His weather-stained face was almost ghastly in its sickly hue. The lines about his mouth were grimly drawn. He was breathing hard, and the great hands that swung at his sides were clenched with the force of a man about to strike.
At the cavern entrance he paused with an abruptness that was almost a lurch. He turned and gazed into the shadowed vault behind him. Then, of a sudden, he raised this clenched fists above his head in a terrible gesture of impotent threat. Then they came slowly, slowly to his sides again. And in a moment he started towards his boat.