Not at Scilly! Then where was he? Up country?
Teresa rose out of her chair and looked Phineas full in the face, stood over him, hair hanging loose, puffy, obese yet withal majestic, tragic beyond words. Something in her swollen eyes made him quail, but not for his own skin, not for himself.
“A Fowey Newfoundlander put into Newlyn Pools morning,” she said, and her voice had a husky burr. “Ten leagues sou’west of the Bishop they found the _Gamecock_ of Monks Cove—bottom up.”
Phineas gripped the edge of the settle and sagged forward. “Then . . .!”
“Yes,” said Teresa. “Drowned. Go home and tell _that_ to your daughter. An’ tell her she’ve got next to her heart the only li’l’ livin’ spark of my lovely boy that’s left in this world. She’m luckier nor I.”
But Ortho was not drowned. Dawn found the _Gamecock_ still afloat, still scudding like a mad thing in the run of the seas. There was no definite dawn, no visible up-rising of the sun; black night slowly changed into leaden day, that was all.
Ortho looked around him. There was nothing to be seen but a toss of waters, breakers rushing foam-lipped before, beside him, roaring in his wake. The boat might have been a hind racing among a pack of wild hounds intent on overwhelming her and dragging her under. There was nothing in sight. He had missed the Scillies altogether, as he had long suspected.
After passing the Runnelstone he had kept his eyes skinned for the coal-fire beacon on St. Agnes (the sole light on the Islands), but not a flicker of it had he seen. He must have passed the wrong side of the Wolf and have missed the mark by miles and miles. As far as he could get his direction by dawn, the wind had gone back and he was running due south now. South—whither? He did not know and cared little.
Anson was dead, sitting up, wedged in the angle of the bows. He had died about an hour before dawn, Ortho thought, after a dreadful paroxysm of choking. Ortho had cried out to him, but got no answer beyond a long-drawn sigh, a sigh of relief, the sigh of a man whose troubles are over. Anson was dead, leaving a widow and three young children. His old friend was dead, had died in agony, shot through the lungs, and left to choke his life out in an open boat in mid-winter. Hatred surged through Ortho, hatred for the Preventive. If he ever got ashore again he’d search out the man that fired that shot and serve him likewise, and while he was choking he’d sit beside him and tell him about Anson in the open boat. As a matter of fact, the man who fired the shot was a recruit who let off his piece through sheer nerves and congratulated himself on having hit nobody—but Ortho did not know that.