The sailcloth shroud - By Charles Williams Page 0,51

now, I hadn’t been then. Every detail of the trip was clear in my mind. But how could it be? The machine said I was trying to hide something. What? And when had it happened? I put my hands up to my face, and it hurt everywhere I touched it. My eyes were swollen almost shut. I was dead tired. I looked at my watch, and saw it was nearly two p.m. Then it occurred to me that if they had arrived five minutes later I would already have called the FBI. That was nice to think about now.

Bonner jerked his head, and Patricia Reagan arose from the couch and followed him into the kitchen like a sleepwalker, or some long-legged mechanical toy.

“You still have plenty of paper?” Slidell asked Flowers. The latter nodded.

“All right, Rogers,” Slidell said. He sat down again, facing me. “Reagan was still alive the morning of the second day—”

“He was alive until after three-thirty p.m., of the fourth day.”

He cut me off. “Stop interrupting. He was alive the morning of the second day, and he still hadn’t said anything about putting him ashore?”

“Not a word,” I said.

He nodded to Flowers to start the paper again. “Go on.”

We went on. The room was silent except for the sound of my voice and the faint humming of the air-conditioner. Graph paper crawled slowly across the face of the instrument from one roll to another while the styli kept up their jagged but unvarying scrawls.

* * *

Dawn came with light airs and a gently heaving sea, and we were alone with no land visible anywhere. As soon as I could see the horizon, Baxter relieved me so I could take a series of star sights. I worked them out under the hooded light of the chart table while Keefer snored gently in the bunk just forward of me. Two of them appeared to be good. We were eighty-four miles from Cristobal, and had averaged a little better than four and a half knots. We’d made slightly more leeway than I’d expected, however, and I corrected the course.

At seven I called Keefer and began frying eggs and bacon. When I was getting them out of the refrigerator, I noticed it was scarcely more than cool inside and apparently hadn’t been running the way it should. After breakfast I checked the batteries of the lighting system, added some distilled water, and ran the generator for a while. We were shaking down to the routine of sea watches now, and Baxter and I were able to get a couple of hours’ sleep while Keefer took the morning watch from eight to twelve. He called me at eleven-thirty.

I got a good fix at noon that put us a little over a hundred miles out from Cristobal. Baxter took the wheel while I worked it out, and Keefer made a platter of thick sandwiches with canned corned beef and slices of onion. I ate mine at the wheel after I took over for the twelve-to-four trick. I threw the empty milk carton overboard, watched it fall astern as I tried to estimate our speed, and lighted a cigarette. I was content; this was the way to live.

It was a magnificent day. The wind had freshened a little since early morning and was a moderate easterly breeze now, directly abeam as she ran lightfooted across the miles on the long reach to the northward, heeled down with water creaming along the rail. The sun shone hotly, drying the spray on my face and arms, and sparkling on the face of the sea as the long rollers advanced, lifted us, and went on. I started the main sheet a little, decided it had been right before, and trimmed it again. Baxter came on deck just as I finished. He smiled. “No good sailor is ever satisfied, I suppose.”

I grinned. “I expect not. But I thought you’d turned in. Couldn’t you sleep?”

“A day like this is too beautiful to waste,” he replied. “And I thought I’d get a little sun.”

He was wearing a white bathrobe with his cigarettes and lighter in one of the pockets. He lighted a cigarette, slipped off the robe, rolled it into a pillow, and stretched out in the sun along the cushions in the starboard side of the cockpit, wearing only a pair of boxer shorts. He lay feet forward, with his head about even with the wheel. He closed his eyes.

“I was just looking at the chart,” he said. “If