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Updated: May 16, 2025
As she sat there, she again heard a creaking in the branches, and Halvard Ullern stood again before her, with his jacket on his arm, and the same bridle in his hand. "You have not found your bay mare yet?" she exclaimed, laughingly. "And you think she is likely to be in this neighborhood?" "I don't know," he answered; "and I don't care if she isn't."
The wind died away absolutely, and a haze gathered delicately over the sea, thickening through the afternoon, and turned rosy by the declining sun. The shore had faded from sight. A sudden energy leaped through John Woolfolk and rang out in an abrupt summons to Halvard. "Get up anchor," he commanded. Poul Halvard, at the mainstay, remarked tentatively: "There's not a capful of wind."
The dull roar of the breaking surf ahead grew louder. Halvard should have had the jib up and been aft at the jigger, but he failed to appear. John Woolfolk wondered, in a mounting impatience, what was the matter with the man. Finally an obscure form passed him and hung over the housed sail, stripping its cover and removing the stops.
John Woolfolk sat at the wheel, motionless except for an occasional scant shifting of his hands. He was sailing by compass; the patent log, trailing behind on its long cord, maintained a constant, jerking register on its dial. He had resolutely banished all thought save that of navigation. Halvard was occupied forward, clearing the deck of the accumulations of the anchorage.
Poul Halvard had been below, by inference asleep; but when the yacht changed her course he immediately appeared on deck. He moved aft, but Woolfolk made no explanation, the sailor put no questions. The wind freshened, grew sustained. Woolfolk said: "Make sail." Soon after, the mainsail rose, a ghostly white expanse on the night.
The winter was half gone; and in all this time Brita had hardly once seen Halvard. Yes, once, it was Christmas-day, she had ventured to peep over to his pew in the church, and had seen him, sitting at his father's side, and gazing vacantly out into the empty space; but as he had caught her glance, he had blushed, and began eagerly to turn the leaves of his hymn-book.
"There's four feet on the bar at low water," he told Halvard. "The tide's at half flood now." The Gar increased her speed, slipping easily out of the bay, gladly, it seemed to Woolfolk, turning toward the sea. The bow rose, and the ketch dipped forward over a spent wave. Millie Stope grasped the wheelbox. "Free!" she said again with shining eyes.
Iscah Nicholas never said a word; and fantastic thoughts wheeled through Woolfolk's brain. He lost all sense of the identity of his opponent and became convinced that he was combating an impersonal hulk the thing that gasped and smeared his face, that strove to end him, was the embodied and evil spirit of the place, a place that even Halvard had seen was damnably wrong.
Then: "I met that Nicholas," Halvard admitted; "without a knife." "Well?" Woolfolk insisted. "There's something wrong with this cursed place," Halvard said defiantly. "You can laugh, but there's a matter in the air that's not natural. My grandmother could have named it. She heard the ravens that called Tollfsen's death, and read Linga's eyes before she strangulated herself.
On the morning following the breaking of his water cask John Woolfolk saw the slender figure of Millie on the beach. She waved and called, her voice coming thin and clear across the water: "Are visitors encouraged?" He sent Halvard in with the tender, and as they approached, dropped a gangway over the Gar's side.
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