The storm raged for hours. It raged far into the night. And deep under the fury of it all the voice of the sea came up from below like an angry roar of a monster lashed and goaded to savage anger. It boomed, it thundered, its echoes playing from cliff to cliff, magnified and terrifying.
Clad in an oilskin, at the height of the storm, McLagan sought the open. He stood out on the plateau, and instantly his great body seemed to become the centre of elemental attack. But he gave no heed. He forced his way in the blinding rain as near to the precipitous edge of the cliff as he dared approach it. Then he stood there swaying to the buffets of the storm while he strove to penetrate the grey pall with which the rain enveloped the world below him. It was useless. And so, at last, he returned to shelter, and the exercise of such patience as he could command.
Dawn saw a complete reversal, a complete transformation. A keen crisp northwest wind had set in, and the furies of the night had been wholly swept away. The sun rose glorious in a cloud-flecked sky, and the world of the coast was as nearly smiling as Nature ever permitted.
But the smile of Nature meant nothing to the men who, ready to set out on their run into Beacon, stood gazing down upon the bay. The wreck of the Imperial was gone. Completely, utterly vanished. A few baulks of timber had been flung high up on the rocks at the foot of the southern cliff, but of the wreck, in its familiar form, not a sign was to be discovered. The ebb of the tide was at its lowest. The rocks on which she had lain were bare. The vessel had gone as she had come, on the race of the tide. But with the difference that her shattered hull had been carried off piecemeal by the victorious adversary she had defied so long.
McLagan was the first to turn away. Sasa Mannik was standing by the ponies hitched to the laden buckboard. He moved over to him and in silence climbed into the driving seat of the ramshackle vehicle. Then he called to Len Stern, who was still gazing down upon the cemetery of that poor restless shadow of the man who had been his friend and partner.
CHAPTER XXIII
The Passing of the “Chief-Light”
REBECCA CARVER was primly seated at one end of a well-upholstered couch. Her slight form was very erect, very much supported in garments that seemed somehow strange to it. Her dark eyes were steadily fixed upon the work in her hands, and the expression of them was carefully concealed. Her greying hair was neatly dressed for the occasion, and she looked to be holding herself schooled for the moment, and the unaccustomed surroundings in which she found herself.