Page:The Way of the Wild (1930).pdf/139

 rum-runner, riding out the gale in the lee of the long sand bar at the island's northern end, had taken him from the water more dead than alive. The rum-runner's business was urgent. She put to sea hours before the half-dead man in her captain's bunk had recovered from his stupor. Norman, when he came on deck, learned that he would not see land again until the first of the Bahamas lifted above the horizon.

It happened that for months he had yearned to see the tropics. Fate, it appeared, had given him a free passage in that direction. He had no close kin to bother about and he knew that his dog was dead. From Nassau he wrote home to apprise his friends of his whereabouts. Then for some five months he knocked about the Indies and the Leewards, working his way on various sorts of craft. Presently, he had enough of it, and the end of the sixth month found him at home again on the plantation of his birth, whence he could see, far away across a wilderness of marsh, the purple woods on the barrier island off which he had parted from the doomed Sea Swallow.

Those woods beckoned him. He could not rid himself of the thought that some cross-current might have washed Rusty ashore on the island beach; and he reflected that the dog, provided he could kill game enough to subsist on, might remain for months