Argosy All-Story Weekly, January 21, 1922 — page 25: what you’re looking at

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

FORTUNE UNAWARES. given that much-abused word a true sig- nificance. No red-blooded chap can be shut up alone like I was without ‘thinking of sex. I had met many girls, and with Kipling’s Tommy, had Jearned about women from them; but, though I had lied valiantly at times and they doubtless had echoed me, I had never seen the one that held me. They had been just “ girls,’ knowing I was a wanderer; all of us ships passing in the night. Now I began to wonder if I should ever meet a woman who would be my partner in our immortality. I was not getting too physchological. Heaven knows I was phy- sical enough to be sorry for St. Anthony. I have set these things down that may be accounted rubbish, because they are part of my human document and because, during that hermit year, I fancy I crawled a bit out of the chrysalis of my self-com- placency. And then Fortune fell out of the sky and I was awake. Really it came up out of the sea, but it amounts to the same thing. I have said I had a boat—and nowhere to go in it. It was May, in the last month of my job and the end of the rains. There had been five months of them with slap of wind and water on the glass, squalls blowing, rain hissing, and everything going moldly if you didn’t constantly overhaul it. For the past two weeks there had been occasional patches of fine weather. I went to bed moody, feeling sodden, and woke up with a new sense of exhilara- tion. Through my window the sun was laughing and tickling the red godling in the ribs. I slept naked those muggy nights, and I went out on the gallery as I was into the glory of the morning. The air was full of sweet savors, the winds retreated to wonderful caverns of pearl where the clouds were piled up in the south. The sea was one great wash of deep ultramarine up to the verge of the reefs. There were no whitecaps, just a toss of white mane here and there. The waves had been freshly faceted overnight and flashd back sapphire dazzles to the sky. On the reefs the water ran the color of the jade dragons on En Sue’s gun, aerated like cham- 15 pagne where the rocks teased it into foam. A school of porpoises rolled like a lot of sea-puppies, and far out a whale spouted. I sang. I had got into the habit of talk- ing to myself. You do. And I warbled for the same reason that a gull squawked at me as it went by at my level. “Yo, ho, my lads, the wind blows free! My home is on the bounding sea; And soon across the waters clear My gallant bark will proudly-y steer Oh, who will sail for—” Then I caught sight of a boat floating ‘leisurely along. I thought it mine, or rather the property of the lighthouse, and watched it with some anxiety as it swung in on the tide that was just making. It bumped gently against a reef, swerved and turned into a channel, down which it sauntered unhelmed, and I saw that I could go down and retrieve it without much diffi- culty. It was still some way off, and the sea dazzle made distracting play about it. But I soon discovered it was no boat of mine, but larger, trimmer in its lines. It came joggling leisurely along until I could look down and into it. What I saw made me dash down through the lantern- chamber and living-room to the ladder that led to the half-covered reefs. The bottom of the boat held two feet or more of bilge, slopping from side to side as the boat bobbed on the tide or struck a reef-rock gently. In this swash lay the body of a man, face down, naked above a pair of dungarees. A second man was in the stern sheets, collapsed, his shoulders slightly raised, his head sunk on his chest, his long legs trailing over a thwart and one tightly clenched fist stuck up above the gunwale. CHAPTER V. THE GREAT RUBY. GOT hold of the boat and inched # up | between the ledges on which the light- house was built. These were uncovered at ordinary flood, when it was calm weather. And I took a closer inspection of that float- ing coffin. It was not pleasant to contem- plate. They had been dead for several comicloool C©