The Girl of the Golden Gate

by William Brown Meloney

This woman was his. She had challenged him against the sea—matched him against all its brute force—and he had won her.

For a second only Emily met and held Paul's glance. Then, lowering her head and throwing herself in abandon across the hatch, she burst into tears. So did the reaction of all she had passed through come upon her.

Paul turned away, chastened by those tears. He realized that no word he might utter then would assuage one drop of them. Action called to him, but he seemed to be unable to put a hand on the situation. A long weather roll caught him unawares. It flung him across the deck and he brought up against the fife rail around the mainmast. His limbs quivered under him; his knees knocked together in weakness. Every muscle of him throbbed and twitched from the effects of the battle he had waged with the sea. A momentary dread that he would never recover his strength seized him.

It was in that instant that his gaze snapped a glimpse of the island far up to windward. It appeared very small. He marveled that the bark could have drifted so far. A lee roll cut the bit of land from his view. He started to call Emily, but forbore at the sound of her sobbing. As if fascinated he waited until the bark lifted on the shoulder of the next swell. Like sugar melting in a teacup the island dissolved in his sight. It stirred him mightily. It aroused in him the spirit of combativeness. It made him realize that the sea would stand not on his dalliance. It ordered him to action and to confront the mystery of the ocean's traffic with the abandoned Daphne.

It required but a glance for him to confirm his estimate of the vessel's size which he had formed in his first view of her from the island and while he swam beside her. She was not less than 1,200 tons burden—about 200 feet long and less than forty feet beam—and heavily sparred. Her lower masts and topmasts were of iron or steel. They were pole masts; that is to say, in one continuous piece. The lower and double topsail-yards also were built of iron or steel. Everything bespoke the fact that she had been built for driving.

Calling to Emily that he would be gone but a minute, Paul drew an iron belaying pin from the fife rail and started aft. He armed himself against surprise, although he felt instinctively that he and Emily were alone. Still, all to be seen about decks indicated that the bark had not been long abandoned.

A teakwood door was open and hooked back against the cabin's forward bulkhead. A similar door on the starboard side was shut. Through the open door he entered the after-living quarters. A slamming of doors and the familiar sound of the hard woods in the cabin's trim, working in their joinings, answered the invader's hail flung from the threshold. Once inside, he found himself in a white-painted alleyway at the end of which a banging door gave him a glimpse of the forward cabin or saloon. His nostrils first caught a stench of lamps which had flickered out in oil dregs.

All ships are so ordered in their appointments that a seaman is never at a loss to find his way in any. Lavelle could have gone about the Daphne blindfolded. He did not have to look at the brass plate over the first door off the alleyway on his right to tell it was the room of the chief mate. The door was open, but something behind it kept it from swinging more than a couple of inches as the vessel labored. He gave it a quick shove and stepped inside the room, only to pause with a gasp of horror.

At the invader's feet, bathed in the morning sunlight which poured through two ports, lay the stark body of a young, lithe-limbed son of the sea. Barely more than a boy he had been. There was a gaping bullet wound between his eyes. It was a wound of exit—where the lead which had killed him had sped away from its work. It cried out a story of assassination to Lavelle; it shrieked to him that the young fellow had been shot from behind, possibly as he slept in his berth with his back toward the door. The rolling of the ship had brought the body to the deck where it lay.

The lockers of the room were wrenched open. Everywhere were signs of disorder; the marks of hurrying, marauding hands. Yet the room had been the castle of a man of order and cleanliness. Lavelle looked particularly for the bark's log book which ordinarily should have been on the small desk at the foot of the berth. It was missing.