Boon Island - Kenneth Roberts [127]
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I thought of broken bones: of a captain made helpless at the hour of our greatest need, and my heart sank.
"What's the matter?" I asked, frightened sick by his apparent weakness.
I got him by the arm and tried to help him up.
He caught me by the shoulders and leaned against me. I couldn't tell whether in falling he had knocked the breath from himself, or was in such excruciating agony that his face was contorted by it into a twisted travesty of a grin.
"Sail," he gasped. "Boat!" Tears ran down his cheeks: snuffling like a child, he swung an arm to the westward, turning me in that direction.
There, halfway between us and the shore, a scant three miles away, was a little sloop, bobbing and bowing, curtsying and rocking over the heavy lead-colored swells, heading straight for the center of the island's western shore on a cold and sharp northwest wind.
I couldn't believe my eyes. I rubbed them, looked all around the horizon: then looked back at the sloop. I wasn't dreaming! I wasn't imagining things! She yawed a little as she slipped down the face of a following sea. A man holding to her mast flapped an arm at his helmsman. She was a real vessel with a patch at the foot of her jib. She had people aboardliving human beings. My throat constricted: my breath caught convulsively at my chest. I couldn't speak: I couldn't draw air into my lungs.
I pulled at the tent-flap and croaked, "Neal!"
He crawled out, white-faced, saw the sloop and made a whimpering sound. The others came out, too. They just stood there, staring at the beautiful little vessel, while tears of which they were unconscious trickled from their eyes and clung in silvery drops to their matted beards.
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We spread out along the western side of the island, trying to convey by gestures, to that man who stood before the sloop's mast, a part of our joy, our gratitude....
Captain Dean waved and waved, pointing to the southeast, where the sloop could run close to the islandclose enough down-wind to hear our voices; but the sloop brought to at the north end of the island, came into the wind, and dropped her anchor and jib. She was as far offshore as the island was long.
"Wave her off," Captain Dean told us. "She'll drag her anchorpile up on a ledge!"
There were three men aboard hersmoothly shaved men with rosy faces, warm clothes, fur hats. Well-fed men, quick-moving, firm on their feet, unlike us: strong men, pillars of strength: symbols of life and salvation.
Captain Dean pointed out to sea, flapped his hands to warn them off. With his arms he made slow circles. To us his meaning was apparent. He wanted them to pull off shore: to sail in circles until high tide. He pointed again and again to the southeast, where they could safely come into the wind and speak us.
Certainly their anchor was dragging, or their roding too short, for she was constantly drawing nearer, pushed by those damnable swells out of the north.
We groaned with relief when she hoisted her jib and fell off a mile to the eastward, headed north, tacked into the west, and then stood off and on, lively as a duck, waiting for flood tide.
Under the best of circumstances, waiting can be one of the worst curses that man is called upon to endurewaiting for a loved one, while the mind conjures up visions of
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injury, disaster, death: waiting tensely, despairingly, for a reply to a letter: waiting fearfully for a battle to begin: waiting for a ship to sail: waiting for a guest to arrive or to go: waiting sleeplessly through the watches of the night for the day that seems determined not to come: waiting, all a-sweat, for the cessation of pain, or for the doctor who may relieve it: waiting apprehensively for a storm to strike or, when it has struck, to abate. Never, I thought, as I waited for that sloop to returnas all of us waited, torn by our fears, our nerves a-janglewould I wittingly add to man's burdens by keeping anyone waiting.
With that sloop in the offing, waiting became