Henderson Daily Dispatch

STORM DRIFT
BY
Ethel M. Dell

CHAPTER 47

Tiggie took no note of tide or time or inside of anything else as he fared forth upon this new journey. His main idea was to fill in an empty evening, and to walk was the only feasible means that occurred to him of so doing. That he was already tired did not somehow seem to matter. He was only dimly aware of fatigue, and the goad to do something, get somewhere, before the day was over, was considerably stronger than any bodily discomfort. The vague mist that hung over the sea was somehow expressive of his state of mind. He was dully miserable without definitely knowing why. It was not active jealousy of Harvey's power to attract interest, so much as discontent with his own complete inability to do so, that possessed him. He was convinced now-fully convinced-that Harvey had lied to him that afternoon. He had not probably been in a state to differentiate between truth and fiction, and it had given him a moment's fantastic amusement to flatter Tiggie in his odd, left-handed fashion. But he had been a fool to have let himself be taken in by it. He always was more or less of a fool, he reflected, digging his heels with a certain vindictiveness into the yielding sand. What wonder that people sought to take advantage of him-even maniacs like Harvey-even the shipwrecked like Vola?

He tried to shut out the latter thought, but it clung. Had not she herself confessed to it? His very foolishness, his vulnerability to fraud, had led her to seek refuge on his raft, well knowing that he would not refuse it to her, even though the added burden swamped them both. How could he ever hope to possess anything more than her gratitude mingled with her pity for his softness?

That was what he was. He was soft!-And every woman who came near him sensed it. It was a quality that had no real appeal for women. He remembered with bitter self-contempt that old affair of his, when he had helped little Peggy Musgrave to achieve the desire of her heart-in which he had never had any place. Would she have liked him better perhaps if he had been more selfish, more assertive of his own rights and interests? Had he failed to win her love because he could not command her respect?

Reason told him no, but he continued to torment himself with such questionings notwithstanding. He was just an amiable fool to the rest of the world, and it was only by a queer perversion of egotism that he could view himself in any other light. They were all wrong, but he could not prove it to them. He was cursed by an ineradicable humility with which some asinine fairy godmother must have presented him at birth, and he was incapable of claiming any position for himself save that allotted to him by others. Whatever he did, by some unwritten law, he was compelled to fall into line with the needs and circumstances of other people. To strike out for himself was for some reason forbidden. His was the task to place himself at the disposal of all the rest, to be ignored or made use of according to necessity. While everyone else fought and stabbed for what they wanted, he could retain nothing for himself but breast forever hand on such prizes as came his way. And it was useless to attempt to rebel and desert his post. Fate the inexorable invariably brought him back to it. It was all he was fitted for since the edict had gone forth that he should never fight for himself.

Thus and thus filed the dreary parade of Tiggie's thoughts as he pursued his solitary way along the rocky shore. And the hours went unheeded, and the tide rose with the day.

(TO BE CONTINUED)

a muffled roaring which any but a fool like Tiggie would have taken for a warning; and the day died with a strange, metallic suddenness long before its time in the ever-gathering, ever-spreading smoke screen of the coming storm.

The breaking of the storm was as sudden and infinitely more compelling than the dying of the day. There might have been a few preliminary rolls of thunder, but if there were they were so mingled with the incessant roar of the incoming tide that as such they were not distinguishable.

But there was no mistaking the storm when it burst in a blinding downward tremor of lightning like the swift unsheathing of a sword and close upon it a crash as though all the chariots of heaven had charged the gates. Thereafter came the seething hissing rush of the rain as it left the sky, and then in a moment it was descending in torrents that whipped the rocks and sand like a thousand flails and dropped a quivering black curtain upon the awe-stricken world.

It was a tempest of almost tropical intensity and even Tiggie was startled out of his absorption at last. He made a dive for shelter towards a dim rock that loomed at hand, but the storm demons laughed at his puny effort, and for the next few seconds it seemed to him that the elements all combined against him in the endeavor to reduce him to a powerless pulp.

Before he could have counted twenty he was as completely drenched as though he had plunged headlong into the sea. Another vivid flash of lightning gave him some idea of his surroundings and he swiftly quitted his first inadequate shelter to plunge inwards towards the cliffs. Here he knew were caves in plenty though he had never explored them: never in fact throughout his stay in Farne had he wandered so far. By the flickering lightning which speedily became almost incessant, he saw that he had reached a small inlet from which the little fishing village was not visible, being cut off by a jutting headland which he had passed unnoticed some distance back. A further belt of rocks in front of him seemed to hem him in, but he was not concerned with this, for he had no intention of pursuing his way any further along that storm-swept shore. The rain had become hail, and large stones battered him with a violence which drove everything but the immediate need for an asylum of some sort out of his head. He ran as he had not run for years, pounding over the slipping shingle through the raging tempest till the great cliffs barred his progress, and then turning and springing from stone to stone till he found a hole into which he could squeeze himself and find comparative dryness.

Thence, panting and exhausted, he looked forth upon the tumult, good-humoredly cursing himself for his folly.

"Of all the damned fools," he said. "I am the damnedest."

It was a wonderful sight upon which he gazed. The whole sea was lit up with the amazing lightning that crossed and double-crossed the thunder-riven sky. Great masses of torn cloud hung like tattered scenery over the water which no longer looked solid but was whipped into foam by the great storm-wind that drove across it. The magnificence of the spectacle compelled Tiggie's admiration though he would gladly have sacrificed it to have been allowed to walk home in peace. The terrific downpour, however, made this quite impossible, and so, finding a damp ledge in his retreat on which to sit, he resigned himself as cheerfully as possible to the inevitable. To and fro the great storm raged now near, now far, turning the fallen

(Copyright by Ethel Mary Surge)

night into pandemonium, while Tiggie remained a prisoner, feeling as if prehistoric monsters were rending the rocks in search of him. Not being super-imaginative he did not feel greatly alarmed, though he did presently admit to himself after a prolonged interval of deafening noise that it was getting beyond a joke. He blinked at the lightning which flamed across the heavens like mighty balls of fire flung from a giant's hand, and earnestly wished that it would cease. The streaming rain almost blotted out the sea, though now and then between the crashes of thunder he heard the roar of the waves as they hurled themselves upon the shore.

It was a long time before the sound, gradually increasing in volume, conveyed anything in the nature of a warning to Tiggie. The storm was so paramount that he had thought for little else, and it was not till this began gradually to abate that he realized the sea was claiming its own share in the general tumult, was in fact slowly becoming the dominating factor thereof.

When that realization dawned upon Tiggie, it did not for several minutes scare him. He knew that the coast was described as tricky by Joe Penny and others, but that any tidal tricks could ever be played upon him was a possibility which with his limited and purely fair weather knowledge of the vicinity had never crossed his mind. It needed more than noise to imbue him with a sense of danger, and as though the storm fiend that had imprisoned him became suddenly impatient of his lack of understanding, the elements abruptly combined to drive the lesson home. In a downward-flickering flash of lightning, a huge wave became terribly illuminated, towering above a tall rock in the foreground, broke with a crash, and swirled in a mass of foam almost up to the very entrance of Tiggie's hiding place.

That taught him all he needed to learn. Ere the wave receded, he was out in the open, stamping on the shingle, waiting for another illuminating flash to show him a way of escape. Once more he called himself a fool-this time with more vehemence. To have forgotten the tide! To have wasted all that precious time in watching the raging elements, when one of them had in effect been gradually closing in upon him as a monster advancing upon his prey! And now to find himself cut off!

But this was unbelievable, unthinkable. There must be some means of deliverance. To be caught there by his own arrant carelessness-like a rat in a trap-was one of those absurd situations that could not possibly materialize. The cliffs-he was sure they were not unscalable. If only the lightning would flash again! Here in the murky night he could discern nothing. But the storm was passing. The lightning was less frequent and far less vivid. Only the overwhelming clouds remained-and the rising, wind-driven sea.

Desperately he stood and waited till presently a vague illusive shimmer of light glanced upon the scene and was gone. It showed him no path up those frowning cliffs-only the narrowing space between them and the oncoming breakers which had drawn far nearer than he had thought possible even in those few moments that he had stood on the beach. But though at this point he fully realized all to which, hitherto, he had been blind, he kept panic at bay. He had at least that advantage over his more sensitive fellows. His nerves were of the steadiest. He might be slow to see an emergency, but he had his full strength to cope with it when he did.