Howard Pyle's Book of pirates : fiction, fact & fancy concerning the buccaneers & marooners of the Spanish Main
him to have his life for leading his daughter astray.
And, as the evil spirit had left Hiram's house, so had another and a
greater evil spirit quitted its harborage. It was heard from Indian
River in a few days more that Blueskin had quitted the inlet and had
sailed away to the southeast; and it was reported, by those who seemed
to know, that he had finally quitted those parts.
It was well for himself that Blueskin left when he did, for not three
days after he sailed away the _Scorpion_ sloop-of-war dropped anchor
in Lewes harbor. The New York agent of the unfortunate packet and a
government commissioner had also come aboard the _Scorpion_.
Without loss of time, the officer in command instituted a keen and
searching examination that brought to light some singularly curious
facts. It was found that a very friendly understanding must have
existed for some time between the pirates and the people of Indian
River, for, in the houses throughout that section, many things--some
of considerable value--that had been taken by the pirates from the
packet, were discovered and seized by the commissioner. Valuables of a
suspicious nature had found their way even into the houses of Lewes
itself.
The whole neighborhood seemed to have become more or less tainted by
the presence of the pirates.
Even poor Hiram White did not escape the suspicions of having had
dealings with them. Of course the examiners were not slow in
discovering that Levi West had been deeply concerned with Blueskin's
doings.
Old Dinah and black Bob were examined, and not only did the story of
Levi's two visitors come to light, but also the fact that Hiram was
present and with them while they were in the house disposing of the
captured goods to their agent.
Of all that he had endured, nothing seemed to cut poor Hiram so deeply
and keenly as these unjust suspicions. They seemed to bring the last
bitter pang, hardest of all to bear.
Levi had taken from him his father's love; he had driven him, if not
to ruin, at least perilously close to it. He had run away with the
girl he loved, and now, through him, even Hiram's good name was gone.
Neither did the suspicions against him remain passive; they became
active.
Goldsmiths' bills, to the amount of several thousand pounds, had been
taken in the packet and Hiram was examined with an almost
inquisitorial closeness and strictness as to whether he had or had not
knowledge of their whereabouts.
Under his accumulated misfortunes, he grew not only more dull, more
taciturn, than ever, but gloomy, moody, brooding as well. For hours he
would sit staring straight before him into the fire, without moving so
much as a hair.
One night--it was a bitterly cold night in February, with three inches
of dry and gritty snow upon the ground--while Hiram sat thus brooding,
there came, of a sudden, a soft tap upon the door.
Low and hesitating as it was, Hiram started violently at the sound. He
sat for a while, looking from right to left. Then suddenly pushing
back his chair, he arose, strode to the door, and flung it wide open.
It was Sally Martin.
Hiram stood for a while staring blankly at her. It was she who first
spoke. "Won't you let me come in, Hi?" said she. "I'm nigh starved
with the cold and I'm fit to die, I'm so hungry. For God's sake, let
me come in."
"Yes," said Hiram, "I'll let you come in, but why don't you go home?"
The poor girl was shivering and chattering with the cold; now she
began crying, wiping her eyes with the corner of a blanket in which
her head and shoulders were wrapped. "I have been home, Hiram," she
said, "but dad, he shut the door in my face. He cursed me just awful,
Hi--I wish I was dead!"
"You better come in," said Hiram. "It's no good standing out there in
the cold." He stood aside and the girl entered, swiftly, gratefully.
At Hiram's bidding black Dinah presently set some food before Sally
and she fell to eating ravenously, almost ferociously. Meantime, while
she ate, Hiram stood with his back to the fire, looking at her
face--that face once so round and rosy, now thin, pinched, haggard.
"Are you sick, Sally?" said he presently.
"No," said she, "but I've had pretty hard times since I left home,
Hi." The tears sprang to her eyes at the recollection of her troubles,
but she only wiped them hastily away with the back of her hand,
without stopping in her eating.
A long pause of dead silence followed. Dinah sat crouched together on
a cricket at the other side of the hearth, listening with interest.
Hiram did not seem to see her. "Did you go off with Levi?" said he at
last, speaking abruptly. The girl looked up furtively under her brows.
"You needn't be afeared to tell," he added.
"Yes," said she at last, "I did go off with him, Hi."
"Where've you been?"
At the question, she suddenly laid down her knife and fork. "Don't
you ask me that, Hi," said she, agitatedly, "I can't tell you that.
You don't know Levi, Hiram; I darsn't tell you anything he don't want
me to. If I told you where I been he'd hunt me out, no matter where I
was, and kill me. If you only knew what I know about him, Hiram, you
wouldn't ask anything about him."
Hiram stood looking broodingly at her for a long time; then at last he
again spoke. "I thought a sight of you onc't, Sally," said he.
Sally did not answer immediately, but, after a while, she suddenly
looked up. "Hiram," said she, "if I tell ye something will you promise
on your oath not to breathe a word to any living soul?" Hiram nodded.
"Then I'll tell you, but if Levi finds I've told he'll murder me as
sure as you're standin' there. Come nigher--I've got to whisper it."
He leaned forward close to her where she sat. She looked swiftly from
right to left; then raising her lips she breathed into his ear: "I'm
an honest woman, Hi. I was married to Levi West before I run away."
XI
The winter had passed, spring had passed, and summer had come.
Whatever Hiram had felt, he had made no sign of suffering.
Nevertheless, his lumpy face had begun to look flabby, his cheeks
hollow, and his loose-jointed body shrunk more awkwardly together into
its clothes. He was often awake at night, sometimes walking up and
down his room until far into the small hours.
It was through such a wakeful spell as this that he entered into the
greatest, the most terrible, happening of his life.
It was a sulphurously hot night in July. The air was like the breath
of a furnace, and it was a hard matter to sleep with even the easiest
mind and under the most favorable circumstances. The full moon shone
in through the open window, laying a white square of light upon the
floor, and Hiram, as he paced up and down, up and down, walked
directly through it, his gaunt figure starting out at every turn into
sudden brightness as he entered the straight line of misty light.
The clock in the kitchen whirred and rang out the hour of twelve, and
Hiram stopped in his walk to count the strokes.
The last vibration died away into silence, and still he stood
motionless, now listening with a new and sudden intentness, for, even
as the clock rang the last stroke, he heard soft, heavy footsteps,
moving slowly and cautiously along the pathway before the house and
directly below the open window. A few seconds more and he heard the
creaking of rusty hinges. The mysterious visitor had entered the mill.
Hiram crept softly to the window and looked out. The moon shone full
on the dusty, shingled face of the old mill, not thirty steps away,
and he saw that the door was standing wide open. A second or two of
stillness followed, and then, as he still stood looking intently, he
saw the figure of a man suddenly appear, sharp and vivid, from the
gaping blackness of the open doorway. Hiram could see his face as
clear as day. It was Levi West, and he carried an empty meal bag over
his arm.
Levi West stood looking from right to left for a second or two, and
then he took off his hat and wiped his brow with the back of his hand.
Then he softly closed the door behind him and left the mill as he had
come, and with the same cautious step. Hiram looked down upon him as
he passed close to the house and almost directly beneath. He could
have touched him with his hand.
Fifty or sixty yards from the house Levi stopped and a second figure
arose from the black shadow in the angle of the worm fence and joined
him. They stood for a while talking together, Levi pointing now and
then toward the mill. Then the two turned, and, climbing over the
fence, cut across an open field and through the tall, shaggy grass
toward the southeast.
Hiram straightened himself and drew a deep breath, and the moon,
shining full upon his face, showed it twisted, convulsed, as it had
been when he had fronted his stepbrother seven months before in the
kitchen. Great beads of sweat stood on his brow and he wiped them away
with his sleeve. Then, coatless, hatless as he was, he swung himself
out of the window, dropped upon the grass, and, without an instant of
hesitation, strode off down the road in the direction that Levi West
had taken.
As he climbed the fence where the two men had climbed it he could see
them in the pallid light, far away across the level, scrubby meadow
land, walking toward a narrow strip of pine woods.
A little later they entered the sharp-cut shadows beneath the trees
and were swallowed in the darkness.
With fixed eyes and close-shut lips, as doggedly, as inexorably as
though he were a Nemesis hunting his enemy down, Hiram followed their
footsteps across the stretch of moonlit open. Then, by and by, he also
was in the shadow of the pines. Here, not a sound broke the midnight
hush. His feet made no noise upon the resinous softness of the ground
below. In that dead, pulseless silence he could distinctly hear the
distant voices of Levi and his companion, sounding loud and resonant
in the hollow of the woods. Beyond the woods was a cornfield, and
presently he heard the rattling of the harsh leaves as the two plunged
into the tasseled jungle. Here, as in the woods, he followed them,
step by step, guided by the noise of their progress through the canes.
Beyond the cornfield ran a road that, skirting to the south of Lewes,
led across a wooden bridge to the wide salt marshes that stretched
between the town and the distant sand hills. Coming out upon this road
Hiram found that he had gained upon those he followed, and that they
now were not fifty paces away, and he could see that Levi's companion
carried over his shoulder what looked like a bundle of tools.
He waited for a little while to let them gain their distance and for
the second time wiped his forehead with his shirt sleeve; then,
without ever once letting his eyes leave them, he climbed the fence to
the roadway.
For a couple of miles or more he followed the two along the white,
level highway, past silent, sleeping houses, past barns, sheds, and
haystacks, looming big in the moonlight, past fields, and woods, and
clearings, past the dark and silent skirts of the town, and so, at
last, out upon the wide, misty salt marshes, which seemed to stretch
away interminably through the pallid light, yet were bounded in the
far distance by the long, white line of sand hills.
Across the level salt marshes he followed them, through the rank sedge
and past the glassy pools in which his own inverted image stalked
beneath as he stalked above; on and on, until at last they had reached
a belt of scrub pines, gnarled and gray, that fringed the foot of the
white sand hills.
Here Hiram kept within the black network of shadow. The two whom he
followed walked more in the open, with their shadows, as black as ink,