The sailcloth shroud - By Charles Williams Page 0,53

of coffee. He sat down in the cockpit.

“You want a cup?” he asked.

I looked at my watch. It was three now. “No, thanks. I’ll get one after Baxter takes over.”

“We ought to have our tails kicked,” he said, “for not thinking to buy a fish line. At this speed we could pick up a dolphin or barracuda.”

“I intended to,” I said, “but forgot it.”

We talked for a while about trolling. Nowadays, when practically all ships made sixteen knots or better, it was out of the question, but when he’d first started going to sea just before the Second World War he’d been on a few of the old eight- and ten-knot tankers on the coastwise run from Texas to the East Coast, and sometimes in the Stream they’d rig a trolling line of heavy sashcord with an inner tube for a snubber. Usually the fish tore off or straightened the hook, but occasionally they’d manage to land one.

He stood up and stretched. “Well, I think I’ll flake out again.”

He started below. Just as his shoulders were disappearing down the companion hatch my eyes fell on Baxter’s robe, which was getting wet with spray. “Here,” I called out, “take this down, will you?”

I rolled it tightly and tossed it. The distance wasn’t more than eight feet, but just before it reached his outstretched hand a freakish gust of wind found an opening and it ballooned suddenly and was snatched to leeward. I sprang from the wheel and lunged for it, but it sailed under the mizzen boom, landed in the water a good ten feet away, and began to fall astern. I looked out at it and cursed myself for an idiot.

“Stand by the backstay!” I called out to Keefer. “We’ll go about and pick it up.”

Then I remembered we hadn’t tacked once since our departure from Cristobal. By the time I’d explained to him about casting off the weather backstay and setting it up on the other side as we came about, the robe was a good hundred and fifty yards astern. “Hard a-lee!” I shouted, and put the helm down. We came up into the wind with the sails slatting. I cast off the port jib sheet and trimmed the starboard one. They ran aft through fairleads to winches at the forward end of the cockpit. Blackie set up the runner. We filled away, and I put the wheel hard over to bring her back across our wake. I steadied her up just to leeward of it.

“Can you see it?” I yelled to Keefer.

“Dead ahead, about a hundred yards,” he called back. “But it’s beginning to sink.”

“Take the wheel!” I ordered. I slid a boathook from under its lashing atop the doghouse and ran forward. I could see it. It was about fifty yards ahead, but only a small part of it still showed above the surface. “Left just a little!” I sang out. “Steady, right there!”

It disappeared. I marked the spot, and as we bore down on it I knelt at the rail just forward of the mainmast and peered down with the boathook poised. We came over the spot. Then I saw it directly below me, three or four feet under the surface now, a white shape drifting slowly downward through the translucent blue of the water. . . .

* * *

“Look!” Flowers cried out.

12

They crowded around the table, staring down at the instrument and the sudden, spasmodic jerking of its styli.

I gripped the arms of the chair as it all began falling into place—the nameless fear, and what had actually caused it, and the apparently insignificant thing that had lodged in my subconscious mind on an afternoon sixteen years ago aboard another boat, a chartered sport fisherman off Miami Beach. I had killed Baxter. Or at least I was responsible for his death.

Bonner growled, and swung around to grab me by the shirt. “You’re lying! So now let’s hear what really happened—”

I tried to swing at his face, but Slidell grabbed my arm before I could pull the instrument off the table by its connecting wires. “Shut up!” I roared. “Get off my back, you stupid ape! I’m trying to understand it myself!”

Slidell waved him off. “Get away!” Bonner stepped back, and Slidell spoke to me. “You didn’t get the bathrobe?”

“No,” I said. All the rage went out of me suddenly, and I leaned back in the chair with my eyes closed. “I touched it with the end of the boathook, but I couldn’t get hold