Page:Weird Tales Volume 5 Number 2 (1925-02).djvu/123

 afternoon sun now slanting far down toward the western horizon. It was a huge land-crab.

He hurled the knife at it, throwing from the point. It was a long throw, but the heavy knife, whirling as it flew, struck with a metallic clash fairly among the great crab's awkward legs. With a shout Renwick ran to his quarry, which, on its remaining sound legs, was attempting to drag itself away.

He picked it up, gingerly, and tied it to the lanyard, and then, with it swinging beside him, continued on his way.

He met Marian playing with some tiny children, her hair aureoled with flaming flamboyant. He held up the crab.

"The only booty from that voyage, I'm sorry to say," he called out to her, "and I didn't get him till after I was back on shore again. It was altogether too far. I'll have to try it in an outrigger some day."

"Have you been swimming all this time?" asked Marian. "I was beginning to worry about you a little!"

"Never worry about me! Lord, Marian, but I'm hungry! I haven't had a thing to eat since this morning."

"Bring along your crab, then," retorted Marian, rising from among the babies. "I wish I had some mayonnaise! My goodness, what a blessing it is that I'm a 'natural cook.' I never saw such a caveman for food."

Together they walked toward their hut, the great crab still struggling at the end of his string for the freedom he would never know again.

When the "natural cook" had done her work and the crab, as such, had ceased to exist, Renwick, leaning back, addressed his wife.

"I hope you won't have to do this sort of thing very long, dear. Any time, of course, a ship may put in for water. Old 'Parmenides' tells me there's one nearly every year; and they've never gone longer than two years without one."

"But it's perfect! I could live here forever—well, a year anyhow."

She placed her chin on her hands and looked at him, her eyes like stars.

"Then I'm satisfied," said Renwick, as he rose to stretch mightily the growing stiffness of his overtaxed muscles. "Let the ship sail in when she's ready. I'm dead-tired after that swim. Do you mind if I turn in?"

"I should think you would want to turn in, after that swim, and after last night. Do you realize that you sat out there in the moonlight, all by yourself, until after 1 o'clock by my wrist watch? It's never missed a tick, all through everything."

She shuddered a little and returned to the subject of his dissipation:

"You may remember I had to wake you up this morning. You had only five hours of sleep!"

UST before he drifted into sleep that night he thought of Caliban! He remembered his frightful delineation as the frontispiece of an old, leather-bound copy of "The Tempest." It was something like that which had been at the back of his mind—his possible metamorphosis into Caliban! So he had phrased it to himself. Caliban!

And now? What was it in Ariel's song? Something about a Change?

The sea—the blessed sea! It had healed him, healed the wounds of his mind. He drifted into dreamless sleep with the sound of its distant thundering in his ears, like a great, kindly benediction.