The All-Story, March 1914 — page 132: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

THI PIT TES | But. toil as he would, the swiit tide fhore him gradually back. His arms fwere aching now and his breath came bin labored gasps. A mist was gather- fing before his eyes, and he seemed to shave become some mechanical autom- raton straining through an infinite task ‘with Promethean agony. y Suddenly there came shouts beside him. .A man from the motor-dory ‘seized the dragging painter of his ‘dory. It tautened, there was a bitter ‘struggle, white water slapped in over the stern, and finally, very slowly, they commenced to draw away from the shouting peril behind. ~ Paul fell forward upon his tace and sobbed. CHAPTER VII. THE AWAKENING. Time rescue of Jerry Thomas and the two Dorp children resulted in Paul's attaining a certain eminence on Grand Manan. It was, however, rather the aloof eminence of a statue on its pedestal than any wari recog- nition of human heroism. Outside this awe, Paul, because of his affliction, was accorded something of the suspicious immunity conferred on lunatics by the middle ages. ‘That aman could lose his whole previous lifetime in one minute had a flavor of the uncanny; and among these people, surrounded for generations by the folk-lore and mystery of crag and sea, the uncanny was akin to the demoniac. Nor was their education in the dark and fearsome neglected. Twice a day on Sundays they sat under men who delighted to picture a divine wrath and a future of endless torment. Heaven had very little place in the hour-long shoutings of these theolog- ical butchers, for, said they: ‘All men are damned before they reach their cradles, and damned they shall be when they sleep in their shrouds.” The first two Sundays of his stay on the island Paul listened in misery SMOLDERING PAST. 605 to these doctrines. Then he revolted, never again to darken a church door —a fact that branded him blackly and forever in the eyes of the people. He no longer lived with Randy and sal Masters. Aside from the crowded quarters there, he found the domestic atmosphere unbearable, and early in August removed to Mis’ Shannon’s boarding-house, a white, bare cottage on the King’s Road a quarter of a mile south of Odd Fellows’ Hall. Here he had a large rear room on the second floor overlooking the bay, and here he lived the imaginative life that his books brought him. Occa- sional “drummers” stayed a day or two in the house, but aside from them two old fishermen and himself were the only boarders. | On Sundays when the bracing au- tumn days had come he would stuff his pockets with lunch and roam south along the road as far as Grand Har- bor or Seal Cove—dingy, picturesque fishing villages. During these walks he gloried in the brilliant tapestry of the hill foliage, set off by the far reaches of sky-blue sea, and found that even here in his prison there was beauty. At such moments he some- times thrilled with the thought that happiness might still exist in the world tor him. On very rare occasions he would meet Betty Sprague at a fork in the road, and they would climb far back into the hilly fastnesses to a fragrant- needled retreat he had long since dis- covered. Here, surrounded by a stal- wart cordon of birches brave in black and silver, he would read to her by the hour from the book he had brought in his pocket. At stich times she would sit listen- ing raptly, her little round chin on the palms of her hands and her eyes wide with serious attention. He liked her company, and he liked still more the hundred varying moods that made her ever changeable and alluring. One day in November, when it had been too cold to readandthey vere.