HE night smelt of heat and of rotting fruit in the hold, and of tar that had sweated from the decks all day. From the bridge sky and sea were black as the pupil of the eye, and the fret of breakers on unseen reefs was all round the Lulu as she ran south before the light trade-wind. She was loaded to the taffrail with island stuff, and, by Ferguson's oath, anxiety had made the skipper "no a fit man to speak to."
Ferguson was first mate, and he had come down to the little saloon to deliver his opinions. The saloon was full of tobacco smoke and the odour of whisky, and of men who sat in their shirt-sleeves and drank pegs or quarrelled over cards at the centre table. Dering looked up as Ferguson burst in. He had a corner against the transom, and there he had smoked six pipes without speech. For Dering only, among the noisy cheerful men, was an alien, and the shibboleth of trade and shipping did not come easily off his tongue.
"A fog, is it?" he asked.
"There or thereabouts," said Ferguson. "The skipper's callin' it wuss. If we clear these reefs wi'out bumping, we'll do weel, I'm thinkin'."
From the table a fair-headed boy laughed. In the early hours of the evening Dering had seen him flirting earnestly with the only white girl aboard.
"What happens to the natives in a wreck, Ferguson?" he asked. "There are about thirty women for'ard, and I guess they could mix things up a few."
"Ah, dinna speak o' wrecks the night, man. This blank dark is ower near the real thing. What wad ye yersel' do in a wreck, Billy?"
The boy laughed again, scooping in his pile of matches.
"Do? Get out and walk, of course. Great Heavens, what's that?"
Every man was on his feet—white-faced, staring, speechless. Below them a shudder ran through the Lulu from bowsprit to stern. She heaved with a groan like a wounded animal, lurched as the trade caught her sideways, and then shrieked in all her timbers as the jagged reef tore the side out of her.
Dering was at the boy's elbow as the two leapt aft to the cabins.
"She's in Number Five," said the boy, thick in his throat. "We can get her out. We must! We"
Dering bad never spoken to the only white girl on board, but he understood. Perhaps the instinctive chivalry of the Englishman told him.
"There are life-belts!" he cried. And then something swift and mighty and resistless took him under the arm-pits, swept him up to the low roof, where he ducked his head to take the impact on his arms, and drew him back and down in a roar of waters split through by the bursting of timbers and the shrieking of many voices.
Something cut at his shoulder as he went down, something struck him over the head. Desire to fight left him; the fierce struggle with straining lungs and eyes that saw red was past. And then the sea gave him back to life, and to the blowing of the spicy wind, and to the knowledge that under his hand floated something that he knew by the feel for a hen-crate. He crooked his knee over it and sat up. The night was black up to his eye-balls and silent as space without shape. It was as though Earth in her spinning had left him behind—alone in the void where no sight nor sound was.
Dering clung to the coop, and slowly understanding came back to him. Then he laughed—a laugh without any mirth in it.
"Me!" he said. "Me—out of them all! And Billy Hollan's gone, and the little girl he thought so much of. The powers that be love a joke!"
Across the water a voice called, thin and weak, Dering's start near loosed his hold on the wood. Then he sent a shout in answer, and forged toward the cry, pushing the coop with effort. A faint ripple of white showed on the dead black of the sea. The cry came again—near—on his left. Dering reached out, touched an oar, slid his hand along until it closed on the cold flesh of a slim wrist. Even in that moment he knew. It was the white girl whom Billy Hollan had gone to his death to save.
"Wait a minute," he said, and gripped her under the arm, and thrust the hen-coop between them. "Now!" he said, and pulled her up the swell of the boards. Then he put an arm about her tightly, across the waist, holding her up by the grasp of his twisted fingers in the bars.
"Oh!" said the girl in a long sobbing breath.
Her head was close at Dering's shoulder, and her wet hair swept his face as they rose and fell to the tide.
"It's all right," he said lamely. "Don't be frightened. We'll know what to do when it gets light."