Sinister Island by Charles Wadsworth Camp (readict books TXT) 📖

“I said—” he began.

Miller raised his hand.

“Don’t begin to crow too soon. Don’t misunderstand me. I haven’t said the things aren’t there, waiting for our hands, because they are if only we can drag them from under cover. They must be. If you ever persuaded me they weren’t I’d apply for admittance at the first comfortable lunatic asylum I could find. I’m no nearer believing in your ghosts than I was at first.”

Tony’s smile showed he was unconvinced.

“At least don’t get the jumps over what you heard,” Miller said. “I’m going to take the dingy now and row to the dunes. I thought it might be pleasant to wander north along the seashore for a few miles. Do you think I’ll meet any spirits in that direction?”

Tony’s face was impassive.

“Good!” Miller laughed. “The sands aren’t as spooky as the island or you’d warn me back.”

He lighted a cigar, descended to the dingy, and prepared to push off.

“A couple of hours at the most,” he called.

Tony smiled again.

“Breakfast then?” he asked.

Miller whistled, but he was shame-faced—a little shocked. Breakfast was a meal he customarily awaited with impatience. Tony, of course, had been busy with its preparations while Morgan and he had talked. For the first time he became aware of the appetizing odour of those preparations. He had completely forgotten breakfast. The fact furnished a disquieting illustration of his state of mind. It warned him that Captain’s Island was, as Molly had promised, increasing its influence upon him.

He took his cigar from his mouth. It was of large size and heavy quality. Usually that brand served as the last ceremony of his morning meal. He had lighted it absent-mindedly. Only now he appreciated its unfamiliar and harsh taste.

He threw the cigar in the water with a quick gesture. As he stepped back to the deck of the Dart his mind groped for an answer to Tony’s comprehending smile.

“Foolish to light that, for your bacon smells good, Tony. After all, I’ve plenty of time.”

He realised its inadequacy. The innuendo would fail with Tony who had had so much experience of his master’s appetite.

He went down the ladder and settled himself on the tapestry cushions. As a matter of fact he ate little, for his mind would not release the unpleasant recollection of its slip.

As he walked northward among the dunes afterwards he was more than ever glad he was to spend the night at the coquina house. Before, he had only been anxious to force the fight. Now, to do so impressed him as a necessity.

The dunes, when he had left the familiar section near the Dart’s anchorage, lured him on for more than two miles before they altered their character. He threaded his way among the graceful, sparkling mounds, catching, now to the left, a glimpse of the inlet, and, now to the right, the flash of the ocean.

Even here he walked carefully, watching the sand ahead of him. He didn’t care to take any unnecessary chances with snakes.

After a long time he scrambled up the side of a high dune and looked around him. He had walked past the curve of the inlet. The end of the island was more than a mile to the south. Across the sands, the marshes, and the water it frowned at him moodily. Even in this warm sunlight it looked forbidding.

He recognised a gleam of white among the trees for the plantation house. The girl was back there long before this. He tried to trace her route to the dunes. Probably she landed over there where the inlet curved and the marshes and the sands were divided by a narrow stream.

He slipped down the shifting flank of the dune and turned towards the marshes. The mounds became smaller and less frequent. Then he passed the last of them. He found that the narrow stream which emptied in the inlet was near at hand. Beyond it the marshes stretched away interminably—a green desert with a few distant clumps of trees which cut into a cloudless sky.

Miller faced straight to the north. There, too, the prospect did not at first vary. As he gazed, however, he thought there was a slight difference. A straight black line against the sky, which he had taken for a dead tree, might be the mast of a boat. Keeping to the sand, he paralleled the course of the stream. Very soon he became convinced that he did, indeed, see a mast ahead.

The marsh straggled now along his side of the stream. It forced him nearer the dunes. As the mast grew sharper and larger and he could see the cords stretched from it, he left the open altogether and sought the shelter of the mounds.

As he had approached unobserved the other morning towards the girl on the beach, so now he crept closer to this boat, apparently secreted among the marshes. He believed he was about to see one of those camps of the oystermen. He remembered Anderson had quoted Bait as saying these men lived in thickets, had the appearance of savages, and were united by some queer, secret organisation.

Miller continued stealthily, answering to a profound curiosity. He could make out now a thicket of stunted cedars and laurel bushes. It hid the boat and the mast for a third of its height.

He chose his path with more care. He tried to keep out of the range of any eyes that might be watching from the thicket at the foot of the mast

The bushes fell away. He paused, examining from behind the shelter of a dune the picture at last uncovered for him.

The dwarf growth twisted from a sandy bank which sloped upwards from the stream and invaded the marsh for a distance of fifteen or twenty feet. Miller guessed that it arranged one of the few shelters offered by the marsh itself for human occupancy.

The boat had been hauled close to the bank. The rough stakes to which it was moored gave the camp a permanent air.

The boat was sloop-rigged. It was squat and, probably, flat-bottomed for traffic in these channels. Unpainted and dirty as it was, it lacked that abandoned appearance of the fisherman’s hulk in the inlet.

There was, moreover, life to be observed here. Miller held his breath and studied it.

Three men sat around a smouldering fire on the bank. Bait had been right. They had the semblance of savages. Nor, Miller realised, had he much exaggerated when he had spoken to the coroner of uncivilised oystermen.

The faces of these men were covered with matted hair. It straggled in long wisps from beneath cloths wrapped about their heads in place of hats. Trousers and jackets, torn and stained, clung to their lanky figures. Their sea-boots were the only apparel which appeared to be whole.

Only once while Miller looked did he hear a voice. Now and then one communicated with another by means of a quick gesture, but for the most part they stared from eyes, reddened and narrowed by the wind, into the ashes of the fire. Behind them a rough lean-to, open at the front, and constructed of cedar stakes and palmetto, raised a primitive background. Empty oyster shells and tins littered the bank.

Miller was glad he had approached from the shelter of the dunes. Yet he felt a strong desire to expose himself now, to question these strange men whose habits were, to all appearances, aboriginal. He weighed the question. If he had only brought his revolver he would not have hesitated. It would be scarcely wise, however, to walk unarmed into this gathering since it scarcely lacked the characteristics of an ambush.

He was not blind to the fact that his caution might be an injustice. The appearance of these men, their very moroseness, might be borrowed from an occupation which chained them almost perpetually apart from the basic decencies of life. They might, indeed, welcome him as a diversion from their monotonous and degrading routine.

As Miller hesitated one of them arose and stepped from the bank to the boat. For the first time a voice broke the silence, hitherto disturbed only by the lapping of the water about the stakes and the hull.

“Come,” the man said. “High time we was off.”

His voice, like Tony’s, was harsh as if from disuse, but it was more guttural, more unpleasant, accustomed, one might have said, to a strange language.

The others got to their feet and joined the one on the boat. They raised the sail, cast off the moorings, and, lifting long poles from the deck, pushed their way, with motions timed to odd grunts, northward through the narrow stream.