Strong Hearts | Page 9

mainland, in that storm, cane- and rice-fields had been
laid low and half destroyed, houses had been unroofed, men had been
killed. A woman and a boy, under a pecan tree, were struck by
lightning; and three men who had covered themselves with a tarpaulin
on one of the wharves in New Orleans were blown with it into the
Mississippi, poor fellows, and were drowned; a fact worthy of second
consideration in the present juncture.

This second thought had hardly been given it before he crept hastily
from his refuge and confronted the gale in quick alarm. The hurricane
was veering to southward. Let it shift but a point or two more, and its
entire force would sweep the lagoon and its beach. Before long the
change came. The mass of canvas at his feet leapt clear of the ground
and fell two or three yards away. He sprang to seize it, but in the same
instant the whole storm--rain, wind, and sand--whirled like a troop of
fiends round the southern end of the island, the ceaseless lightnings
showing the way, and came tearing and howling up its hither side. The
white sail lifted, bellied, rolled, fell, vaulted into the air, fell again,
tumbled on, and at the foot of a dune stopped until its wind-buffeted
pursuer had almost overtaken it. Then it fled again, faster, faster, higher,
higher up the sandy slope to its top, caught and clung an instant on
some unseen bush, and then with one mad bound into the black sky,
unrolled, widened like a phantom, and vanished forever.
Gregory turned in desperation, and in the glare of the lightning looked
back toward his raft. Great waves were rolling along and across the
slender reef in wide obliques and beating themselves to death in the
lagoon, or sweeping out of it again seaward at its more northern end.
On the dishevelled crest of one he saw his raft, and on another its mast.
He could not look a second time. The flying sand blinded him and cut
the blood from his face. He could only cover his eyes and crawl under
the bushes in such poor lee as he could find; and there, with the first
lull of the storm, heavy with exhaustion and despair, he fell asleep and
slept until far into the day. When he awoke the tempest was over.
Even more completely the tumult within him was quieted. He rose and
stood forth mute in spirit as in speech; humbled, yet content, in the
consciousness that having miserably failed first to save himself and
then to rue himself back to destruction, the hurricane had been his
deliverer. It had spared his supplies, his ammunition, his weapons, only
hiding them deeper under the dune sands; but scarce a vestige of his
camp remained and of his raft nothing. As once more from the highest
sand-ridge he looked down upon the sea weltering in the majestic
after-heavings of its passion, at the eastern beach booming under the
shock of its lofty rollers, and then into the sky still gray with the

endless flight of southward-hurrying scud, he felt the stir of a new
attachment to them and his wild prison, and pledged alliance with them
thenceforth.

VI
Here, in giving me his account, Gregory asked me if that sounded
sentimental. I said no, and thereupon he actually tried to apologize to
me as though I were a professional story-teller, for having had so few
deep feelings in the moments where the romancists are supposed to
place them. I told him what I had once seen a mechanic do on a steep,
slated roof nearly a hundred feet from the pavement. He had faced
round from his work, which was close to the ridge-tiles, probably to
kick off the shabby shoes he had on, when some hold failed him and he
began to slide toward the eaves. We people in the street below fairly
moaned our horror, but he didn't utter a sound. He held back with all
his skill, one leg thrust out in front, the other drawn up with the knee to
his breast, and his hands flattened beside him on the slates, but he came
steadily on down till his forward foot passed over the eaves and his
heel caught on the tin gutter. Then he stopped. We held our breath
below. He slowly and cautiously threw off one shoe, then the other, and
then turned, climbed back up the roof and resumed his work. And we
two or three witnesses down in the street didn't think any less of him
because he did so without any show of our glad emotion.
"O, if I had that fellow's nerve," said Gregory, "that would be another
thing!"
My wife and I smiled at each other.