Arundel by Kenneth Roberts Read Free Book Online

behind him all the company streamed from the inn, uproarious and cursing with excitement.
    The tide was out and the mud of the creek showed faintly luminous in the dull night light. Bellowing still, Cap placed his foot against the stranger’s back and propelled him heartily into the slimy creek bottom. He landed with a mighty slap, slid a foot or more, and lay motionless until our laughter began to fade.
    He got slowly to his feet and faced us, and the burst of mirth that had followed his descent ceased entirely.
    His features were hidden because of the black mud that covered them, and he was horrible to see. He was like some proud animal disfigured by an ignominious wound, enraged and deadly.
    And so, though all of us within that very moment had been screaming with laughter, we no longer saw any fun in the matter.
    He uttered no word: he just eyed us; and we stared at him for the length of time it takes a breaker to curl and fall. Then he turned and dragged himself through the clinging muck toward the Abenaki wigwams on the other shore; and somehow his going was more sinister and more menacing than any threatening gestures could have been.
    We stood looking after him until he vanished, and I heard my father beside me breathing deeply. At length he spoke harshly to Cap, though it seemed to me his voice was softer than his words.
    “Why don’t you go for a pirate, where you belong? God knows what ill luck you’ll bring on us yet. Come in and keep quiet, and I’ll give you enough buttered rum to make you peaceable from helplessness.”

III
    I THINK I would have slept until long past sun-up on the following morning, and so had my face dowsed with water by my father, had not Cap Huff fallen over me as I lay warmly on my bag of straw by the kitchen door, and knocked sleep and wind from me at the same time.
    He gave me a sheath knife, sharp as a razor, when I had let him out as quietly as possible; but quiet was beyond him because he was full of hoarse complaints of his head, which he said held seventeen rusted nails driven through from ear to ear. His tongue he damned for being henceforth useless—it had grown to the size of a fair codfish, he said, and then, not content with its prodigiousness, had perversely got itself besmeared with glue and besprinkled with sand until he could scarce so much as waggle it, and feared it were best out at once and he dumb and done for.
    As for the knife, I seemed to remember seeing it on the stranger’s thigh before Cap hurled him into the mud. It may be Cap, in the heat of battle, had thoughtlessly plucked it from his opponent’s belt; and that reminded me to scrutinize him lest he might be carrying away with him a poke of my mother’s sugar, which would have inconvenienced us somewhat.
    The wind was still in the east as Cap bawled his farewells and rode westward toward the beaches and the curved blue line of the Wells shore. The rain had ceased and the crows were hard at work squabbling among themselves and breakfasting, dropping mussels from a height onto the hard sand, so the shells might be broken and the meat exposed, and this they seldom do unless the weather be about to clear.
    I turned from them to find the house astir. My sisters and Mary had carried their straw bags, along with mine, to the penthouse behind the kitchen and were wiping their faces with a damp huckaback towel at the bench beside the kitchen door. I was filled with dissatisfaction at the sight of Mary, for I knew she would soon be leaving; and the world, instead of seeming homelike and gay, became forlorn.
    All my life, since then, that same feeling has come back to me as if it kept a mournful anniversary on such an autumn morning, when the dawn is silent because the songbirds have gone away to the South, and approaching winter has set its cold fingers on the house, and the crows carouse at sun-up in the open meadows and on the beaches.
    It is a feeling of impending loss, of wasted days, of vanished friendship;