The night before, Dominic Lefountain, a farmer living alone at Meteighan, a little village on the French shore, had been awakened from his sleep by the moaning and wailing of a human voice. For days the imminent peril of an assault from the pirates had filled the people of the French coast with forebodings. And now, awakened thus in the dead of night, the lonely Frenchman was wellnigh paralyzed with terror. With his flesh creeping, and his eyes wide, he groped for his rifle, and waited in the darkness, while ever and anon came those unearthly cries from the beach. Nearly an hour passed before he could gather himself together sufficiently to investigate the cause of the alarm. At last, when the piteous wailing had grown weak and intermittent, the instinct of humanity mastered his fears, and he went forth to give a possible succor to the one in need.
On the beach, lying prostrate, with the water lapping about his feet, he found a man in the last stage of exhaustion. The blood was flowing from his mouth, and as Dominic turned him over to stanch its flow, he found that his tongue had been cut out, and hence the unearthly wailing which had roused him from his sleep. The beach was deserted by this time, and it was too dark to see far out into the bay.
Dominic carried the unfortunate man to his house, and nursed him there for many weeks. He survived his frightful experiences, and lived on for twenty years, a pathetic and helpless figure, supported by the big-hearted farmers and fishermen of the French shore. Evidently he had known too much for his enemies, and they had sealed his mouth forever. He became known as the "Mysterious Man of Meteighan," and his deplorable condition was always pointed to as a mute witness of the last villainy of Mogul Mackenzie.
On the night following the episode of the "Mysterious Man of Meteighan," a wild and untoward storm swept down the North Atlantic and over the seaboard far and near. In the Bay of Fundy that night the elements met in their grandest extremes. Tide-rips and mountain waves opposed each other with titanic force. All along the bleak and rock-ribbed coast the boiling waters lay churned into foam. Over the breakwaters the giant combers crashed and soared far up into the troubled sky; while out under the black clouds of the night the whirlpools and the tempests met. Was ever a night like this before? Those on shore thanked God; and those with fathers on the sea gazed out upon a darkness where no star of hope could shine.
