第18章

"I don't know," I answered."Do you?"

He fidgeted, avoided my eyes, and then rapidly, almost surreptitiously crossed himself.

"No," he replied."I know nothing.Some things I have heard--but they tell many tales on these seas."He started for the door.Before he reached it he turned.

"But this I do know," he half whispered, "I am damned glad there is no full moon tonight." And passed out, leaving me staring after him in amazement.What did the Portuguese know?

I bent over the sleeper.On his face was no trace of that unholy mingling of opposites the Dweller stamped upon its victims.

And yet--what was it the Norseman had said?

"The sparkling devil took them!" Nay, he had been even more explicit--"The sparkling devil that came down from the moon!"Could it be that the Dweller had swept upon the Brun-hilda, drawing down the moon path Olaf Huldricksson's wife and babe even as it had drawn Throckmartin?

As I sat thinking the cabin grew suddenly dark and from above came a shouting and patter of feet.Down upon us swept one of the abrupt, violent squalls that are met with in those latitudes.I lashed Huldricksson fast in the berth and ran up on deck.

The long, peaceful swells had changed into angry, choppy waves from the tops of which the spindrift streamed in long stinging lashes.

A half-hour passed; the squall died as quickly as it had arisen.The sea quieted.Over in the west, from beneath the tattered, flying edge of the storm, dropped the red globe of the setting sun; dropped slowly until it touched the sea rim.

I watched it--and rubbed my eyes and stared again.For over its flaming portal something huge and black moved, like a gigantic beckoning finger!

Da Costa had seen it, too, and he turned the Suwarna straight toward the descending orb and its strange shadow.

As we approached we saw it was a little mass of wreckage and that the beckoning finger was a wing of canvas, sticking up and swaying with the motion of the waves.On the high-est point of the wreckage sat a tall figure calmly smoking a cigarette.

We brought the Suwarna to, dropped a boat, and with my-self as coxswain pulled toward a wrecked hydroairplane.Its occupant took a long puff at his cigarette, waved a cheerful hand, shouted a greeting.And just as he did so a great wave raised itself up behind him, took the wreckage, tossed it high in a swelter of foam, and passed on.When we had steadied our boat, where wreck and man had been was--nothing.

There came a tug at the side--, two muscular brown hands gripped it close to my left, and a sleek, black, wet head showed its top between them.Two bright, blue eyes that held deep within them a laughing deviltry looked into mine, and a long, lithe body drew itself gently over the thwart and seated its dripping self at my feet.

"Much obliged," said this man from the sea."I knew somebody was sure to come along when the O'Keefe ban-shee didn't show up."

"The what?" I asked in amazement.

"The O'Keefe banshee--I'm Larry O'Keefe.It's a far way from Ireland, but not too far for the O'Keefe banshee to travel if the O'Keefe was going to click in."I looked again at my astonishing rescue.He seemed per-fectly serious.

"Have you a cigarette? Mine went out," he said with a grin, as he reached a moist hand out for the little cylinder, took it, lighted it.

I saw a lean, intelligent face whose fighting jaw was soft-ened by the wistfulness of the clean-cut lips and the honesty that lay side by side with the deviltry in the laughing blue eyes; nose of a thoroughbred with the suspicion of a tilt;long, well-knit, slender figure that I knew must have all the strength of fine steel; the uniform of a lieutenant in the Royal Flying Corps of Britain's navy.

He laughed, stretched out a firm hand, and gripped mine.

"Thank you really ever so much, old man," he said.

I liked Larry O'Keefe from the beginning--but I did not dream as the Tonga boys pulled us back to the Suwarna bow that liking was to be forged into man's strong love for man by fires which souls such as his and mine--and yours who read this--could never dream.

Larry! Larry O'Keefe, where are you now with your leprechauns and banshee, your heart of a child, your laugh-ing blue eyes, and your fearless soul? Shall I ever see you again, Larry O'Keefe, dear to me as some best beloved younger brother? Larry!