Strong Hearts | Page 5

the twilight, came in friendly recognition, the drone of a
conch-shell, the last happy salutation Sweetheart was ever to receive.
Then the evening star silvered their wake through the deep Rigolets,
and the rising moon met them, her and her lover, in Lake Borgne,
passing the dark pines of Round Island, and hurrying on toward the
white sand-keys of the Gulf.
The night was well advanced as they neared the pine-crested dunes of
Cat Island, in whose lee a more cautious sailor would have dropped
anchor till the morning. But to this pair every mile of these fickle
waters, channel and mud-lump, snug lagoon, open sea and hidden bar,
each and all, were known as the woods are known to a hunter, and, as
he drew her hand closer to his side, she turned across the track of the
moon and bounded into the wide south. A maze of marsh
islands--huddling along that narrow, half- drowned mainland of cypress
swamp and trembling prairie which follows the Mississippi out to
sea--slept, leagues away, below the western waters. In the east lay but
one slender boundary between the voyager and the shoreless deep, and
this was so near that from its farther edge came now and again its
admonishing murmur, the surf-thunder of the open Gulf rolling forever
down the prone but unshaken battle-front of the sandy Chandeleurs.

IV
So all night, lest wind or resolve should fail next day, he sailed. How to
tell just where dawn found him I scarcely know.
Somewhere in that blue wilderness, with no other shore in sight, yet not
over three miles northeast of a "pass" between two long tide-covered

sand- reefs, a ferment of delta silt--if science guesses right--had lifted
higher than most of the islands behind it in the sunken west one mere
islet in the shape of a broad crescent, with its outward curve to seaward
and a deep, slender lagoon on the landward side filling the whole
length of its bight. About half the island was flat and was covered with
those strong marsh grasses for which you've seen cattle, on the
mainland, venture so hungrily into the deep ooze. The rest, the southern
half, rose in dazzling white dunes twenty feet or more in height and
dappled green with patches of ragged sod and thin groups of dwarfed
and wind-flattened shrubs. As the sun rose, Sweetheart and her sailor
glided through a gap in the sand reef that closed the lagoon in, luffed,
and as a great cloud of nesting pelicans rose from their dirty town on
the flats, ran softly upon the inner sands, where a rillet, a mere thread of
sweet water, trickled across the white beach. Here he waded ashore
with the utensils and provisions, made a fire, washed down a hot
breakfast of bacon and pone with a pint of black coffee, returned to his
boat and slept until afternoon. Wakened at length by the canting of the
sloop with the fall of the tide, he rose, rekindled his fire, cooked and ate
again, smoked two pipes, and then, idly shouldering his gun, made a
long half-circuit of the beach to south and eastward, mounted the
highest dune and gazed far and wide.
Nowhere on sand or sea under the illimitable dome was there sign of
human presence on the earth. Nor would there likely be any. Except by
misadventure no ship on any course ever showed more than a topmast
above this horizon. Of the hunters and fishermen who roamed the
islands nearer shore, with the Chandeleurs, the storm-drowned Grand
Gosiers and the deep- sea fishing grounds beyond, few knew the way
hither, and fewer ever sailed it. At the sound of his gun the birds of the
beach--sea-snipe, curlew, plover--showed the whites of their wings for
an instant and fell to feeding again. Save when the swift
Wilderness--you remember the revenue cutter?-chanced this way on
her devious patrol, only the steamer of the light-house inspection
service, once a month, came up out of the southwest through yonder
channel and passed within hail on her way from the stations of the
Belize to those of Mississippi Sound; and he knew--had known before
he left the New Basin--that she had just gone by here the day before.

But to Gregory this solitude brought no quick distress. With a bird or
two at his belt he turned again toward his dying fire. Once on the way
he paused, as he came in sight of the sloop, and gazed upon it with a
faintness of heart he had not known since his voyage began. However,
it presently left him, and hurrying down to her side he began to unload
her completely, and to make a permanent camp in the lee of a ridge of
sand crested with dwarfed casino