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Updated: May 16, 2025
Woolfolk was forward, preparing a chain hawser for coral anchorages, when he saw Halvard tramping shortly back over the sand. He entered the tender and, with a vicious shove, rowed with a powerful, vindictive sweep toward the ketch. The cask evidently had been left behind. He made the tender fast and swung aboard with his notable agility.
The bay grew opaque and seamed with white scars. After the meridian the rain ceased, but the wind maintained its volume, clamoring beneath a leaden pall. John Woolfolk, in dripping yellow oilskins, occasionally circled the deck of his ketch. Halvard had everything in a perfection of order. When the rain stopped, the sailor dropped into the tender and with a boat sponge bailed vigorously.
There was the sound of a heavy fall, a diminishing thrashing in the saw grass, and silence. An indistinguishable form advanced over, the wharf, and Woolfolk prepared to shove the tender free. But it was Poul Halvard. He got down, Woolfolk thought, clumsily, and mechanically assumed his place at the oars. Woolfolk sat aft, with an arm about Millie Stope. The sailor said fretfully: "I stopped him.
When they landed at Thurso, they heard that Thorbiorn Klerk was hiding and lying in wait in Thorsdale in order to make an onslaught on Ragnvald, if he got a chance. Next day, as they rode up along Calfdale, Ragnvald was in advance of the party, and, at a homestead called Force, Halvard hailed him loudly by name.
His gaze reminded her of that of an ox, but it had not only the ox's dullness, but also its simplicity and good-nature. They sat talking on for a while about the weather, the cattle, and the prospects of the crops. "What is your name?" she asked, at last. "Halvard Hedinson Ullern."
This arduous task accomplished, he immediately rose. John Woolfolk again took his place, turning to address the other, when he saw that one side of Halvard's face was bluish and rapidly swelling. "What's the matter with your jaw?" he promptly inquired. Halvard avoided his gaze, obviously reluctant to speak, but Woolfolk's silent interrogation was insistent.
On the ketch Halvard had gone below for the night. The yacht swayed slightly to an unseen swell; the riding light moved backward and forward, its ray flickering over the glassy water. John Woolfolk brought his bedding from the cabin and, disposing it on deck, lay with his wakeful dark face set against the far, multitudinous worlds. In the morning Halvard proposed a repainting of the engine.
Halvard's oars struck the water smartly and forced the tender forward into the beating wind. They made a choppy passage to the rim of the bay, where, turning, they followed the thin, pale glimmer of the broken water on the land's edge. Halvard pulled with short, telling strokes, his oarblades stirring into momentary being livid blurs of phosphorescence.
The explosions settled into a dull, regular succession, and he coupled the propeller and slowly maneuvered the ketch up over the anchors, reducing the strain on the hawsers and allowing Halvard to get in the slack. He waited impatiently for the sailor's cry of all clear, and demanded the cause of the delay. "The bight slipped," the other called in a muffled, angry voice.
She was stark with terror, and held abjectly to the rail while the next swell lifted them upward. He attempted to urge her back to the protection of the cabin, but she resisted with such a convulsive determination that he relinquished the effort and enveloped her in his glistening oilskin. This had consumed a perilous amount of time; and, swiftly decisive, he commanded Halvard to take the wheel.
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