“Whar’s the drownded feller?” he asked, grasping the rail.
“We don’t know,” Fairchild answered. “We missed him somewhere between here and the shore.” He extended his arm. The newcomer followed his gesture sadly.
“Any reward?”
“Reward?” repeated Fairchild.
“Reward?” Mrs. Maurier chimed in, breathlessly. “Yes, there is a reward: I offer a reward.”
“How much?”
“You find him first,” the Semitic man put in. “There’ll be a reward, all right.”
The man clung yet to the rail. “Have you drug fer him yet?”
“No, we’ve just started hunting,” Fairchild answered. “You go on and look around, and we’ll get our boat and come out and help you. There’ll be a reward.”
The man pushed his skiff clear and engaged his oars.
The sound of the motor boat grew clearer steadily; soon it came into view, with two men in it, and changed its course and bore down on the skiff. The fussy little engine ceased its racket and it slid up to the skiff, pushing a dying ripple under its stem. The two boats clung together for a time, then they parted, and at a short distance from each other they moved slowly onward while their occupants prodded at the lake bottom with their oars.
“Look at them,” the Semitic man said, “just like buzzards. Probably be a dozen boats out there in the next hour. How do you suppose they learned about it?”
“Lord knows,” Fairchild answered. “Let’s get our crew and go out and help look. We better get the tug’s men.” They shouted in turn for a while, and presently one came to the rail of the tug and gazed apathetically at them, and went away; and after a while the small boat came away from the tug and crossed to them. A consultation, assisted by all hands, while the man from the tug moved unhurriedly about the business of making fast another and dirtier rope to the Nausikaa’s bows.
Then he and Walter went back to the tug, paying out the line behind them while Mrs. Maurier’s insistence wasted itself upon the somnolent afternoon. The guests looked at one another helplessly. Then Fairchild said with determination:
“Come on, we’ll go in our boat.” He chose his men, and they gathered all the available oars and prepared to embark.
“Here comes the tug’s boat again,” Mark Frost said. “They forgot and tied one end of that rope to something.” Mrs. Wiseman said viciously. The boat came alongside without haste and it and the yacht’s tender lay rubbing noses, and Walter’s companion asked, without interest:
“Wher’s the feller y’all drownded?”
“I’ll go along in their boat and show ’em,” Fairchild decided. Mark Frost got back aboard the yacht with alacrity. Fairchild stopped him. “You folks come on behind us in this boat. The more to hunt, the better.”
Mark Frost groaned and acquiesced. The others took their places, and under Fairchild’s direction the two tenders retraced the course of yesterday. The first two boats were some distance ahead, moving slowly, and the tenders separated also and the searchers poled along, prodding with their oars at the lake floor. And such is the influence of action on the mind that soon even Fairchild’s burly optimism became hushed and uncertain before the imminence of the unknown, and he too was accepting the possible for the probable, unaware.
The sun was hazed, as though wearied of its own implacable heat, and the water — that water which might hold, soon to be revealed, the mute evidence of ultimate flouting of all man’s strife — lapped and plopped at the mechanical fragilities that supported them: a small sound, monotonous and without rancor — it could well wait! They poled slowly on.
Soon the four boats, fanwise, had traversed the course, and they turned and quartered back and forth again, slowly and in silence. Afternoon drew on, drowsing and somnolent. Yacht and tug lay motionless in a blinding shimmer of water and sun….
Again the course of yesterday was covered foot by foot, patiently and silently and in vain; and the four boats as without volition drew nearer each other, drifting closer together as sheep huddle, while water lapped and plopped beneath their hulls, sinister and untroubled by waiting… soon the motor boat drifted up and scraped lightly along the hull in which Fairchild sat, and he raised his head, blinking against the glare. After a while he said:
“Are you a ghost, or am I?”
“I was about to ask you that,” Gordon, sitting in the motor boat, replied. They sat and stared at each other. The other boats came up, and presently the one called Walter spoke.
“Is this all you wanted out here,” he asked in a tone of polite disgust, breaking the spell, “or do you want to row around some more?”
Fairchild went immoderately into hysterical laughter.
FOUR O’CLOCK
The malarial man had attached his skiff to the fat man’s motor boat and they had puttered away in a morose dejection, rewardless; the tug had whistled a final derisive blast, showed them her squat, unpretty stern, where the negro leaned eating again of his grayish object, and as dirty a pair of heels as it would ever be their luck to see, and sailed away.
The Nausikaa was free once more and she sped quickly onward, gaining offing, and the final sharp concussion of flesh and flesh died away beneath the afternoon.
Mrs. Maurier had gazed at him, raised her hands in a fluttering cringing gesture, and cut him dead.
“But I saw you on the boat right after we came back,” Fairchild repeated with a sort of stubborn wonder. He opened a fresh bottle.
“You couldn’t have,” Gordon answered shortly. “I got out of the boat in the middle of Talliaferro’s excitement.” He waved away the proffered glass. The Semitic man said triumphantly, “I told you so,” and Fairchild essayed again, stubbornly:
“But I saw—”
“If you say that again,” the Semitic man told him, “I’ll kill you.” He addressed Gordon. “And you thought Dawson was drowned?”
“Yes. The man who brought me back — I stumbled on his house this morning — he had already heard of it, some way. It must have spread all up and down the lake. He didn’t remember the name, exactly, and when I named over the party and said Dawson Fairchild, he agreed. Dawson and Gordon — you see? And so I thought—”
Fairchild began to laugh again. He laughed steadily, trying to say something. “And so — and so he comes back and sp-spends—” Again that hysterical note came into his laughter and his hands trembled, clinking the bottle against the glass and sloshing a spoonful of the liquor onto the floor “ — and spends… He comes back, you know, and spends half a day looking — looking for his own bububod—”
The Semitic man rose and took the bottle and glass from him and half led, half thrust him into his bunk. “You sit down and drink this.” Fairchild drank the whisky obediently. The Semitic man turned to Gordon again. “What made you come back? Not just because you heard Dawson was drowned, was it?”
Gordon stood against the wall, mudstained and silent. He raised his head and stared at them, and through them, with his harsh, uncomfortable stare. Fairchild touched the Semitic man’s knee warningly.
“That’s neither here nor there,” he said. “The question is, Shall we or shall we not get drunk? I kind of think we’ve got to, myself.”
“Yes,” the other agreed. “It looks like it’s up to us. Gordon ought to celebrate his resurrection, anyway.”
“No,” Gordon answered, “I don’t want any.” The Semitic man protested, but again Fairchild gripped him silent, and when Gordon turned toward the door, he rose and followed him into the passage.
“She came back too, you know,” he said.
Gordon looked down at the shorter man with his lean bearded face, his lonely hawk’s face arrogant with shyness and pride. “I know it,” he answered (your name is like a little golden bell hung in my heart). “The man who brought me back was the same one who brought them back yesterday.”
“He was?” said Fairchild. “He’s doing a landoffice business with deserters, ain’t he?”
“Yes,” Gordon answered. And he went on down the passage with a singing lightness in his heart, a bright silver joy like wings.
The deck was deserted, as on that other afternoon. But he waited patiently in the hushed happiness of his dream and his arrogant bitter heart was young as any yet, as forgetful of yesterday and to-morrow; and soon, as though in answer to it, she came barelegged and molded by the wind of motion, and her grave surprise ebbed and she thrust him a hard tanned hand.
“So you ran away,” she said.
“And so did you,” he answered after an interval filled with a thing all silver and clean and fine.
“That’s right. We’re sure the herrings on this boat, aren’t we?”
“Herrings?”
“Guts, you know,” she explained. She looked at him gravely from beneath the coarse dark bang of her hair. “But you came back,” she accused.
“And so did you,” he reminded her from amid his soundless silver wings.
FIVE O’CLOCK
“But we’re moving again, at last,” Mrs. Maurier repeated at intervals, with a detached air, listening to a sound somehow vaguely convivial that welled at intervals up the companionway. Presently Mrs. Wiseman remarked the hostess’ preoccupied air and she too ceased, hearkening.
“Not again?” she said with foreboding.
“I’m afraid so,” the other answered unhappily.
Mr. Talliaferro hearkened also. “Perhaps I’d better…” Mrs. Maurier fixed him with her eye, and Mrs. Wiseman said:
“Poor fellows. They have had to stand a great deal in the last few days.”
“Boys will
