Strong Hearts | Page 6

bushes, well up from the beach. The
night did not stop him, and by the time he was tired enough for sleep he
had lightened the boat of everything stowed into her the previous day.
Before sunrise he was at work again, removing her sandbags, her sails,
flags, cordage, even her spars. The mast would have been heavy for
two men to handle, but he got it out whole, though not without hurting
one hand so painfully that he had to lie off for over two hours. But by
midday he was busy again, and when at low water poor Sweetheart
comfortably turned upon her side on the odorous, clean sand, it was
never more to rise. The keen, new axe of her master ended her days.
"No! O no!" he said to me, "call it anything but courage! I felt--I don't
want to be sentimental--I'm sure I was not sentimental at the time,
but--I felt as though I were a murderer. All I knew was that it had to be
done. I trembled like a thief. I had to stoop twice before I could take up
the axe, and I was so cold my teeth chattered. When I lifted the first
blow I didn't know where it was going to fall. But it struck as true as a
die, and then I flew at it. I never chopped so fast or clean in my life. I
wasn't fierce; I was as full of self-delight as an overpraised child. And
yet when something delayed me an instant I found I was still shaking.
Courage," said he, "O no; I know what it was, and I knew then. But I
had no choice; it was my last chance."
I told him that anyone might have thought him a madman chopping up
his last chance.
"Maybe so," he replied, "but I wasn't; it was the one sane thing I could
do;" and he went on to tell me that when night fell the tallest fire that
ever leapt from those sands blazed from Sweetheart's piled ribs and
keel.
It was proof to him of his having been shrewd, he said, that for many

days he felt no repentance of the act nor was in the least lonely. There
was an infinite relief merely in getting clean away from the huge world
of men, with all its exactions and temptations and the myriad rebukes
and rebuffs of its crass propriety and thrift. He had endured solitude
enough in it; the secret loneliness of a spiritual bankruptcy. Here was
life begun over, with none to make new debts to except nature and
himself, and no besetments but his own circumvented propensities.
What humble, happy masterhood! Each dawn he rose from dreamless
sleep and leaped into the surf as into the embrace of a new existence.
Every hour of day brought some unfretting task or hale pastime. With
sheath-knife and sail-needle he made of his mainsail a handsome tent,
using the mainboom for his ridge- pole, and finishing it just in time for
the first night of rain--when, nevertheless, he lost all his coffee!
He did not waste toil. He hoarded its opportunities as one might
husband salt on the mountains or water in the desert, and loitering in
well calculated idleness between thoughts many and things of sea and
shore innumerable, filled the intervals from labor to labor with gentle
entertainment. Skyward ponderings by night, canny discoveries under
foot by day, quickened his mind and sight to vast and to minute
significancies, until they declared an Author known to him hitherto
only by tradition. Every acre of the barren islet grew fertile in beauties
and mysteries, and a handful of sand at the door of his tent held him for
hours guessing the titanic battles that had ground the invincible quartz
to that crystal meal and fed it to the sea.
I may be more rhetorical than he was, but he made all the more of these
conditions while experiencing them, because he knew they could not
last out the thirty days, nor half the thirty, and took modest comfort in a
will strong enough to meet all present demands, well knowing there
was one exigency yet to arise, one old usurer still to be settled with
who had not yet brought in his dun.

V
It came--began to come--in the middle of the second week. At its

familiar approach he felt no dismay, save a certain inert dismay that it
brought none. Three, four, five times he went bravely to the rill,
drowned his thirst and called himself satisfied; but the second day was
worse than the first; the craving seemed better than the rill's brief cure
of it, and once he rose straight from drinking of the stream and climbed
the dune to