The Open Boat and Other Stories
water caught the boat and whirled it almost perpendicular. Water
swarmed in from all sides. The correspondent had his hands on the
gunwale at this time, and when the water entered at that place he
swiftly withdrew his fingers, as if he objected to wetting them.
The little boat, drunken with this weight of water, reeled and snuggled
deeper into the sea.
"Bail her out, cook! Bail her out," said the captain.
"All right, captain," said the cook.
"Now, boys, the next one will do for us, sure," said the oiler. "Mind
to jump clear of the boat."
The third wave moved forward, huge, furious, implacable. It fairly
swallowed the dingey, and almost simultaneously the men tumbled into
the sea. A piece of life-belt had lain in the bottom of the boat, and
as the correspondent went overboard he held this to his chest with his
left hand.
The January water was icy, and he reflected immediately that it was
colder than he had expected to find it off the coast of Florida. This
appeared to his dazed mind as a fact important enough to be noted at
the time. The coldness of the water was sad; it was tragic. This fact
was somehow so mixed and confused with his opinion of his own situation
that it seemed almost a proper reason for tears. The water was cold.
When he came to the surface he was conscious of little but the noisy
water. Afterward he saw his companions in the sea. The oiler was
ahead in the race. He was swimming strongly and rapidly. Off to the
correspondent's left, the cook's great white and corked back bulged out
of the water, and in the rear the captain was hanging with his one good
hand to the keel of the overturned dingey.
There is a certain immovable quality to a shore, and the correspondent
wondered at it amid the confusion of the sea.
It seemed also very attractive, but the correspondent knew that it was
a long journey, and he paddled leisurely. The piece of life-preserver
lay under him, and sometimes he whirled down the incline of a wave as
if he were on a hand-sled.
But finally he arrived at a place in the sea where travel was beset
with difficulty. He did not pause swimming to inquire what manner of
current had caught him, but there his progress ceased. The shore was
set before him like a bit of scenery on a stage, and he looked at it
and understood with his eyes each detail of it.
As the cook passed, much farther to the left, the captain was calling
to him, "Turn over on your back, cook! Turn over on your back and use
the oar."
"All right, sir." The cook turned on his back, and, paddling with an
oar, went ahead as if he were a canoe.
Presently the boat also passed to the left of the correspondent with
the captain clinging with one hand to the keel. He would have appeared
like a man raising himself to look over a board fence, if it were
not for the extraordinary gymnastics of the boat. The correspondent
marvelled that the captain could still hold to it.
They passed on, nearer to shore--the oiler, the cook, the captain--and
following them went the water-jar, bouncing gaily over the seas.
The correspondent remained in the grip of this strange new enemy--a
current. The shore, with its white slope of sand and its green bluff,
topped with little silent cottages, was spread like a picture before
him. It was very near to him then, but he was impressed as one who in a
gallery looks at a scene from Brittany or Holland.
He thought: "I am going to drown? Can it be possible? Can it be
possible? Can it be possible?" Perhaps an individual must consider his
own death to be the final phenomenon of nature.
But later a wave perhaps whirled him out of this small deadly current,
for he found suddenly that he could again make progress toward the
shore. Later still, he was aware that the captain, clinging with one
hand to the keel of the dingey, had his face turned away from the shore
and toward him, and was calling his name. "Come to the boat! Come to
the boat!"
In his struggle to reach the captain and the boat, he reflected that
when one gets properly wearied, drowning must really be a comfortable
arrangement, a cessation of hostilities accompanied by a large degree
of relief, and he was glad of it, for the main thing in his mind for
some moments had been horror of the temporary agony. He did not wish to
be hurt.
Presently he saw a man running along the shore. He was undressing with
most remarkable speed. Coat, trousers, shirt, everything flew magically
off him.
"Come to the boat," called the captain.
"All right, captain." As the correspondent paddled, he saw the captain
let himself down to bottom and leave the boat. Then the correspondent
performed his one little marvel of the voyage. A large wave caught him
and flung him with ease and supreme speed completely over the boat and
far beyond it. It struck him even then as an event in gymnastics, and
a true miracle of the sea. An overturned boat in the surf is not a
plaything to a swimming man.
The correspondent arrived in water that reached only to his waist, but
his condition did not enable him to stand for more than a moment. Each
wave knocked him into a heap, and the under-tow pulled at him.
Then he saw the man who had been running and undressing, and undressing
and running, come bounding into the water. He dragged ashore the cook,
and then waded towards the captain, but the captain waved him away, and
sent him to the correspondent. He was naked, naked as a tree in winter,
but a halo was about his head, and he shone like a saint. He gave a
strong pull, and a long drag, and a bully heave at the correspondent's
hand. The correspondent, schooled in the minor formulæ, said: "Thanks,
old man." But suddenly the man cried: "What's that?" He pointed a swift
finger. The correspondent said: "Go."
In the shallows, face downward, lay the oiler. His forehead touched
sand that was periodically, between each wave, clear of the sea.
The correspondent did not know all that transpired afterward. When he
achieved safe ground he fell, striking the sand with each particular
part of his body. It was as if he had dropped from a roof, but the thud
was grateful to him.
It seems that instantly the beach was populated with men with blankets,
clothes, and flasks, and women with coffee-pots and all the remedies
sacred to their minds. The welcome of the land to the men from the sea
was warm and generous, but a still and dripping shape was carried
slowly up the beach, and the land's welcome for it could only be the
different and sinister hospitality of the grave.
When it came night, the white waves paced to and fro in the moonlight,
and the wind brought the sound of the great sea's voice to the men on
shore, and they felt that they could then be interpreters.
A MAN AND SOME OTHERS
I
Dark mesquit spread from horizon to horizon. There was no house or
horseman from which a mind could evolve a city or a crowd. The world
was declared to be a desert and unpeopled. Sometimes, however, on
days when no heat-mist arose, a blue shape, dim, of the substance
of a spectre's veil, appeared in the south-west, and a pondering
sheep-herder might remember that there were mountains.
In the silence of these plains the sudden and childish banging of a
tin pan could have made an iron-nerved man leap into the air. The sky
was ever flawless; the manoeuvring of clouds was an unknown pageant;
but at times a sheep-herder could see, miles away, the long, white
streamers of dust rising from the feet of another's flock, and the
interest became intense.
Bill was arduously cooking his dinner, bending over the fire, and
toiling like a blacksmith. A movement, a flash of strange colour,
perhaps, off in the bushes, caused him suddenly to turn his head.
Presently he arose, and, shading his eyes with his hand, stood
motionless and gazing. He perceived at last a Mexican sheep-herder
winding through the brush toward his camp.
"Hello!" shouted Bill.
The Mexican made no answer, but came steadily forward until he was
within some twenty yards. There he paused, and, folding his arms,
drew himself up in the manner affected by the villain in the play.
His serape muffled the lower part of his face, and his great sombrero
shaded his brow. Being unexpected and also silent, he had something of
the quality of an apparition; moreover, it was clearly his intention to
be mysterious and devilish.
The American's pipe, sticking carelessly in the corner of his mouth,
was twisted until the wrong side was uppermost, and he held his
frying-pan poised in the air. He surveyed with evident surprise this
apparition in the mesquit. "Hello, José!" he said; "what's the matter?"
The Mexican spoke with the solemnity of funeral tollings: "Beel,
you mus' geet off range. We want you geet off range. We no like.
Un'erstan'? We no like."
"What you talking about?" said Bill. "No like what?"
"We no like you here. Un'erstan'? Too mooch. You mus' geet out. We no
like. Un'erstan'?"
"Understand? No; I don't know what the blazes you're gittin' at."
Bill's eyes wavered in bewilderment, and his jaw fell. "I must git out?
I must git off the range? What you givin' us?"
The Mexican unfolded his serape with his small yellow hand. Upon his
face was then to be seen a smile that was gently, almost caressingly
murderous. "Beel," he said, "geet out!"
Bill's arm dropped until the frying-pan was at his knee. Finally he
turned again toward the fire. "Go on, you dog-gone little yaller rat!"
he said over his shoulder. "You fellers can't chase me off this range.
I got as much right here as anybody."
"Beel," answered the other in a vibrant tone, thrusting his head
forward and moving one foot, "you geet out or we keel you."
"Who will?" said Bill.
"I--and the others." The Mexican tapped his breast gracefully.
Bill reflected for a time, and then he said: "You ain't got no manner
of license to warn me off'n this range, and I won't move a rod.
Understand? I've got rights, and I suppose if I don't see 'em through,
no one is likely to give me a good hand and help me lick you fellers,
since I'm the only white man in half a day's ride. Now, look; if you
fellers try to rush this camp, I'm goin' to plug about fifty per cent.
of the gentlemen present, sure. I'm goin' in for trouble, an' I'll
git a lot of you. 'Nuther thing: if I was a fine valuable caballero
like you, I'd stay in the rear till the shootin' was done, because I'm
goin' to make a particular p'int of shootin' you through the chest." He
grinned affably, and made a gesture of dismissal.
As for the Mexican, he waved his hands in a consummate expression
of indifference. "Oh, all right," he said. Then, in a tone of deep
menace and glee, he added: "We will keel you eef you no geet. They have
decide'."
"They have, have they?" said Bill. "Well, you tell them to go to the
devil!"
II
Bill had been a mine-owner in Wyoming, a great man, an aristocrat,
one who possessed unlimited credit in the saloons down the gulch. He
had the social weight that could interrupt a lynching or advise a bad
man of the particular merits of a remote geographical point. However,
the fates exploded the toy balloon with which they had amused Bill,
and on the evening of the same day he was a professional gambler with
ill-fortune dealing him unspeakable irritation in the shape of three
big cards whenever another fellow stood pat. It is well here to inform
the world that Bill considered his calamities of life all dwarfs in
comparison with the excitement of one particular evening, when three
kings came to him with criminal regularity against a man who always
filled a straight. Later he became a cow-boy, more weirdly abandoned
than if he had never been an aristocrat. By this time all that remained