O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 by Various

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Alone, I paced back and forth--countless soft-footed miles, it seemed,
through interminable hours, until at length some obscure impulse
prompted me to pause before the open sky-light over the cabin and
thrust my head down. A lamp above the dining-table, left to burn
through the night, feebly illuminated the room. A faint snore issued
at regular intervals from the half-open door of the mate's stateroom.
The door of Joyce's stateroom opposite was also upon the hook for
the sake of air.

Suddenly a soft thump against the side of the schooner, followed by
a scrambling noise, made me turn round. The dripping, bedraggled
figure of a man in a sleeping-suit mounted the rope ladder that hung
over the side, and paused, grasping the rail. I had withdrawn my
gaze so suddenly from the glow of the light in the cabin that for
several moments the intruder from out of the sea was only a blurred
form with one leg hung over the rail, where he hung as if spent by
his exertions.

Just then the sooty vapours above the edged maw of the volcano were
rent by a flare of crimson, and in the fleeting instant of unnatural
daylight I beheld Farquharson, bare-footed, and dripping with
sea-water, confronting me with a sardonic, triumphant smile. The
light faded in a twinkling, but in the darkness he swung his other
leg over the rail and sat perched there, as if challenging the
testimony of my senses.

"Farquharson!" I breathed aloud, utterly dumfounded.

"Did you think I was a ghost?" I could hear him softly laughing to
himself in the interval that followed. "You should have witnessed
Wadakimba's fright at my coming back from the dead. Well, I'll admit
I almost was done for."

Again the volcano breathed in torment. It was like the sudden
opening of a gigantic blast-furnace, and in that instant I saw him
vividly--his thin, saturnine face, his damp black hair pushed
sleekly back, his lips twisted to a cruel smile, his eyes craftily
alert, as if to some ambushed danger continually at hand. He was
watching me with a sort of malicious relish in the shock he had
given me.

"It was not your intention to stop at Muloa," he observed, dryly,
for the plight of the schooner was obvious.

"We'll float clear with the tide," I muttered.

"But in the meantime"--there was something almost menacing in his
deliberate pause--"I have the pleasure of this little call upon you."

A head lifted from among the inert figures and sleepily regarded us
before it dropped back into the shadows. The stranded ship, the
recumbent men, the mountain flaming overhead--it was like a phantom
world into which had been suddenly thrust this ghastly and
incredible reality.

"Whatever possessed you to swim out here in the middle of the night?"
I demanded, in a harsh whisper.

He chose to ignore the question, while I waited in a chill of
suspense. It was inconceivable that he could be aware of the truth
of the situation and deliberately bent on forcing it to its
unspeakable, tragic issue.

"Of late, Captain Barnaby, we seem to have taken to visiting each
other rather frequently, don't you think?"

It was lightly tossed off, but not without its evil implication; and
I felt his eyes intently fixed upon me as he sat hunched up on the
rail in his sodden sleeping-suit, like some huge, ill-omened bird of
prey.

To get rid of him, to obliterate the horrible fact that he still
existed in the flesh, was the instinctive impulse of my staggered
brain. But the peril of discovery, the chance that those sleeping
below might waken and hear us, held me in a vise of indecision.

"If I could bring myself to reproach you, Captain," he went on,
ironically polite, "I might protest that your last visit to this
island savoured of a too-inquisitive intrusion. You'll pardon my
frankness. I had convinced you and Major Stanleigh that Farquharson
was dead. To the world at large that should have sufficed. That I
choose to remain alive is my own affair. Your sudden return to
Muloa--with a lady--would have upset everything, if Fate and that
inspired fool of a Malay had not happily intervened. But now, surely,
there can be no doubt that I am dead?"

I nodded assent in a dumb, helpless way.

"And I have a notion that even you, Captain Barnaby, will never
dispute that fact."

He threw back his head suddenly--for all the world like the dancing
faun--and laughed silently at the stars.

My tongue was dry in my mouth as I tried to make some rejoinder. He
baffled me completely, and meanwhile I was in a tingle of fear lest
the mate should come up on deck to see what progress the tide had
made, or lest the sound of our voices might waken the girl in
Joyce's stateroom.

"I can promise you that," I attempted to assure him in weak,
sepulchral tones. "And now, if you like, I'll put you ashore in the
small boat. You must be getting chilly in that wet sleeping-suit."

"As a matter of fact I am, and I was wondering if you would not
offer me something to drink."

"You shall have a bottle to take along," I promised, with alacrity,
but he demurred.

"There is no sociability in that. And you seem very lonesome
here--stuck for two more hours at least. Come, Captain, fetch your
bottle and we will share it together."

He got down from the rail, stretched his arms lazily above his head,
and dropped into one of the deck chairs that had been placed aft for
the convenience of my two passengers.

"And cigars, too, Captain," he suggested, with a politeness that was
almost impertinence. "We'll have a cozy hour or two out of this
tedious wait for the tide to lift you off."

I contemplated him helplessly. There was no alternative but to fall
in with whatever mad caprice might seize his brain. If I opposed him,
it would lead to high and querulous words; and the hideous fact of
his presence there--of his mere existence--I was bound to conceal at
all hazards.

"I must ask you to keep quiet," I said, stiffly.

"As a tomb," he agreed, and his eyes twinkled disagreeably in the
darkness. "You forget that I am supposed to be in one."

I went stealthily down into the cabin, where I secured a box of
cigars and the first couple of bottles that my hands laid hold of in
the locker. They proved to contain an old Tokay wine which I had
treasured for several years to no particular purpose. The ancient
bottles clinked heavily in my grasp as I mounted again to the deck.

"Now this is something like," he purred, watching like a cat my
every motion as I set the glasses forth and guardedly drew the cork.
He saluted me with a flourish and drank.

To an onlooker that pantomime in the darkness would have seemed
utterly grotesque. I tasted the fragrant, heavy wine and
waited--waited in an agony of suspense--my ears strained desperately
to catch the least sound from below. But a profound silence
enveloped the schooner, broken only by the occasional rhythmic snore
of the mate.

"You seem rather ill at ease," Farquharson observed from the depths
of the deck chair when he had his cigar comfortably aglow. "I trust
it isn't this little impromptu call of mine that's disturbing you.
After all, life has its unusual moments, and this, I think, is one
of them." He sniffed the bouquet of his wine and drank. "It is rare
moments like this--bizarre, incredible, what you like--that
compensate for the tedium of years."

His disengaged hand had fallen to the side of the chair, and I now
observed in dismay that a scarf belonging to Joyce's wife had been
left lying in the chair, and that his fingers were absently twisting
the silken fringe.

"I wonder that you stick it out, as you do, on this island," I
forced myself to observe, seeking safety in the commonplace, while
my eyes, as if fascinated, watched his fingers toying with the ends
of the scarf. I was forced to accept the innuendo beneath his
enigmatic utterances. His utter baseness and depravity, born perhaps
of a diseased mind, I could understand. I had led him to bait a trap
with the fiction of his own death, but he could not know that it had
been already sprung upon his unsuspecting victims.

He seemed to regard me with contemptuous pity. "Naturally, you wonder.
A mere skipper like yourself fails to understand--many things. What
can you know of life cooped up in this schooner? You touch only the
surface of things just as this confounded boat of yours skims only
the top of the water. Once in a lifetime you may come to real grips
with life--strike bottom, eh?--as your schooner has done now. Then
you're aground and quite helpless. What a pity!"

He lifted his glass and drank it off, then thrust it out to be
refilled. "Life as the world lives it--bah!" he dismissed it with
the scorn of one who counts himself divested of all illusions.
"Life would be an infernal bore if it were not for its paradoxes.
Now you, Captain Barnaby, would never dream that in becoming dead to
the world--in other people's belief--I have become intensely alive.
There are opened up infinite possibilities--"

He drank again and eyed me darkly, and then went on in his
crack-brained way. "What is life but a challenge to pretense, a
constant exercise in duplicity, with so few that come to master it
as an art? Every one goes about with something locked deep in his
heart. Take yourself, Captain Barnaby. You have your secrets--hidden
from me, from all the world--which, if they could be dragged out of
you--"

His deep-set eyes bored through the darkness upon me. Hunched up in
the deck chair, with his legs crossed under him, he was like an
animated Buddha venting a dark philosophy and seeking to undermine
my mental balance with his sophistry.

"I'm a plain man of the sea," I rejoined, bluntly. "I take life as
it comes."

He smiled derisively, drained his glass, and held it out again.
"But you have your secrets, rather clumsily guarded, to be sure--"

"What secrets?" I cried out, goaded almost beyond endurance.

He seemed to deprecate the vigour of my retort and lifted a
cautioning hand. "Do you want every one on board to hear this
conversation?" At that moment the smoke-wrapped cone of Lakalatcha
was cleft by a sheet of flame, and we confronted each other in a
sort of blood-red dawn.

"There is no reason why we should quarrel," he went on, after
darkness had enveloped us again. "But there are times which call
for plain speaking. Major Stanleigh is probably hardly aware of just
what he said to me under a little artful questioning. It seems that
a lady who--shall we say, whom we both have the honour of knowing?
--is in love. Love, mark you. It is always interesting to see that
flower bud twice from the same stalk. However, one naturally defers
to a lady, especially when one is very much in her way. _Place aux
dames_, eh? Exit poor Farquharson! You must admit that his was an
altruistic soul. Well, she has her freedom--if only to barter it for
a new bondage. Shall we drink to the happy future of that romance?"

He lifted to me his glass with ironical invitation, while I sat
aghast and speechless, my heart pounding against my ribs. This
intolerable colloquy could not last forever. I deliberated what I
should do if we were surprised. At the sound of a footfall or the
soft creak of a plank I felt that I might lose all control and leap
up and brain him with the heavy bottle in my grasp. I had an insane
desire to spring at his throat and throttle his infamous bravado,
tumble him overboard and annihilate the last vestige of his existence.

"Come, Captain," he urged, "you, too, have shared in smoothing the
path for these lovers. Shall we not drink to their happy union?"

A feeling of utter loathing went over me. I set my glass down.
"It would be a more serviceable compliment to the lady in question
if I strangled you on the spot," I muttered, boldly.

"But you are forgetting that I am already dead." He threw his head
back as if vastly amused, then lurched forward and held out his
glass a little unsteadily to be refilled.

He gave me a quick, evil look. "Besides, the noise might disturb
your passengers."

I could feel a cold perspiration suddenly breaking out upon my body.
Either the fellow had obtained an inkling of the truth in some
incredible way, or was blindly on the track of it, guided by some
diabolical scent. Under the spell of his eyes, I could not manage
the outright lie which stuck in my throat.

"What makes you think I have passengers?" I parried, weakly.

With intent or not, he was again fingering the fringe of the scarf
that hung over the arm of the chair.

"It is not your usual practice, but you have been carrying them
lately."

He drained his glass and sat staring into it, his head drooping a
little forward. The heavy wine was beginning to have its effect upon
him, but whether it would provoke him to some outright violence or
drag him down into a stupor, I could not predict. Suddenly the glass
slipped from his fingers and shivered to pieces on the deck. I
started violently at the sound, and in the silence that followed I
thought I heard a footfall in the cabin below.

He looked up at length from his absorbed contemplation of the bits
of broken glass. "We were talking about love, were we not?" he
demanded, heavily.

I did not answer. I was straining to catch a repetition of the sound
from below. Time was slipping rapidly away, and to sit on meant
inevitable discovery. The watch might waken or the mate appear to
surprise me in converse with my nocturnal visitor. It would be folly
to attempt to conceal his presence and I despaired of getting him
back to shore while his present mood held, although I remembered
that the small boat, which had been lowered after we went aground,
was still moored to the rail amidships.

Refilling my own glass, I offered it to him. He lurched forward to
take it, but the fumes of the wine suddenly drifted clear of his
brain. "You seem very much distressed," he observed, with ironic
concern. "One might think you were actually sheltering these
precious love-birds."

Perspiration broke out anew upon my face and neck. "I don't know what
you are talking about," I bluntly tried to fend off his implication.
I felt as if I were helplessly strapped down and that he was about
to probe me mercilessly with some sharp instrument. I strode to turn
the direction of his thoughts by saying, "I understand that the
Stanleighs are returning to England."

"The Stanleighs--quite so," he nodded agreement, and fixed me with a
maudlin stare. Something prompted me to fill his glass again. He
drank it off mechanically. Again I poured, and he obediently drank.
With an effort he tried to pick up the thread of our conversation:

"What did you say? Oh, the Stanleighs ... yes, yes, of course." He
slowly nodded his head and fell silent. "I was about to say ..." He
broke off again and seemed to ruminate profoundly.... "Love-birds--"
I caught the word feebly from his lips, spoken as if in a daze. The
glass hung dripping in his relaxed grasp.

It was a crucial moment in which his purpose seemed to waver and die
in his clouded brain. A great hope sprang up in my heart, which was
hammering furiously. If I could divert his fuddled thoughts and get
him back to shore while the wine lulled him to forgetfulness.

I leaned forward to take the glass which was all but slipping from
his hand, when Lakalatcha flamed with redoubled fury. It was as if
the mountain had suddenly bared its fiery heart to the heavens, and
a muffled detonation reached my ears.

Farquharson straightened up with a jerk and scanned the smoking peak,
from which a new trickle of white-hot lava had broken forth in a
threadlike waterfall. He watched its graceful play as if hypnotized,
and began babbling to himself in an incoherent prattle. All his
faculties seemed suddenly awake, but riveted solely upon the heavy
labouring of the mountain. He was chiding it in Malay as if it were
a fractious child. When I ventured to urge him back to shore he made
no protest, but followed me into the boat. As I pushed off and took
up the oars he had eyes for nothing but the flaming cone, as if its
leaping fires held for him an Apocalyptic vision.

I strained at the oars as if in a race, with all eternity at stake,
blindly urging the boat ahead through water that flashed crimson at
every stroke. The mountain now flamed like a beacon, and I rowed for
dear life over a sea of blood.

Farquharson sat entranced before the spectacle, chanting to himself
a kind of insane ritual, like a Parsee fire-worshipper making
obeisance before his god. He was rapt away to some plane of mystic
exaltation, to some hinterland of the soul that merged upon madness.
When at length the boat crunched upon the sandy shore he got up
unsteadily from the stern and pointed to the pharos that flamed in
the heavens.

"The fire upon the altar is lit," he addressed me, oracularly, while
the fanatic light of a devotee burned in his eyes. "Shall we ascend
and prepare the sacrifice?"

I leaned over the oars, panting from my exertions, indifferent to
his rhapsody.

"If you'll take my advice, you'll get back at once to your bungalow
and strip off that wet sleeping-suit," I bluntly counseled him, but
I might as well have argued with a man in a trance.

He leaped over the gunwale and strode up the beach. Again he struck
his priest-like attitude and invoked me to follow.

"The fire upon the altar waits," he repeated, solemnly. Suddenly he
broke into a shrill laugh and ran like a deer in the direction of the
forest that stretched up the slopes of the mountain.

The mate's face, thrust over the rail as I drew alongside the
schooner, plainly bespoke his utter bewilderment. He must have
thought me bereft of my senses to be paddling about at that hour of
the night. The tide had made, and the _Sylph_, righting her listed
masts, was standing clear of the shoal. The deck was astir, and when
the command was given to hoist the sails it was obeyed with an
uneasy alacrity. The men worked frantically in a bright, unnatural
day, for Lakalatcha was now continuously aflame and tossing up
red-hot rocks to the accompaniment of dull sounds of explosion.

My first glance about the deck had been one of relief to note that
Joyce and his wife were not there, although the commotion of getting
under sail must have awakened them. A breeze had sprung up which
would prove a fair wind as soon as the _Sylph_ stood clear of the
point. The mate gave a grunt of satisfaction when at length the
schooner began to dip her bow and lay over to the task. Leaving him
in charge, I started to go below, when suddenly Mrs. Joyce, fully
dressed, confronted me. She seemed to have materialized out of the
air like a ghost. Her hair glowed like burnished copper in the
unnatural illumination which bathed the deck, but her face was ashen,
and the challenge of her eyes made my heart stop short.

"You have been awake long?" I ventured to ask.

"Too long," she answered, significantly, with her face turned away,
looking down into the water. She had taken my arm and drawn me
toward the rail. Now I felt her fingers tighten convulsively. In the
droop of her head and the tense curve of her neck I sensed her mad
impulse which the dark water suggested.

"Mrs. Joyce!" I remonstrated, sharply.

She seemed to go limp all over at the words. I drew her along the
deck for a faltering step or two, while her eyes continued to brood
upon the water rushing past. Suddenly she spoke:

"What other way out is there?"

"Never that," I said, shortly. I urged her forward again. "Is your
husband asleep?"

"Thank God, yes!"

"Then you have been awake--"

"For over an hour," she confessed, and I detected the shudder that
went over her body.

"The man is mad--"

"But I am married to him." She stopped and caught at the rail like a
prisoner gripping at the bars that confine him. "I cannot--cannot
endure it! Where are you taking me? Where _can_ you take me? Don't
you see that there is no escape--from this?"

The _Sylph_ rose and sank to the first long roll of the open sea.

"When we reach Malduna--" I began, but the words were only torture.

"I cannot--cannot go on. Take me back!--to that island! Let me live
abandoned--or rather die--"

"Mrs. Joyce, I beg of you...."

The schooner rose and dipped again.

For what seemed an interminable time we paced the deck together
while Lakalatcha flamed farther and farther astern. Her words came
in fitful snatches as if spoken in a delirium, and at times she
would pause and grip the rail to stare back, wild-eyed, at the
receding island.

Suddenly she started, and in a sort of blinding, noon-day blaze I
saw her face blanch with horror. It was as if at that moment the
heavens had cracked asunder and the night had fallen away in chaos.
Turning, I saw the cone of the mountain lifting skyward in
fragments--and saw no more, for the blinding vision remained seared
upon the retina of my eyes.

Across the water, slower paced, came the dread concussion of sound.

"Good God! It's carried away the whole island!" I heard the mate's
voice bellowing above the cries of the men. The _Sylph_ scudded
before the approaching storm of fire redescending from the sky....

The first gray of the dawn disclosed Mrs. Joyce still standing by
the rail, her hand nestling within the arm of her husband,
indifferent to the heavy grayish dust that fell in benediction upon
her like a silent shower of snow.

The island of Muloa remains to-day a charred cinder lapped about by
the blue Pacific. At times gulls circle over its blackened and
desolate surface devoid of every vestige of life. From the squat,
truncated mass of Lakalatcha, shorn of half its lordly height, a
feeble wisp of smoke still issues to the breeze, as if Vulcan, tired
of his forge, had banked its fire before abandoning it.

THE ARGOSIES

BY ALEXANDER HULL

From _Scribner's Magazine_

There may have been some benevolent force watching over Harber. In
any case, that would be a comforting belief. Certainly Harber
himself so believed, and I know he had no trouble at all convincing
his wife. Yes, the Harbers believed.

But credulity, you may say, was ever the surest part in love's young
golden dream: and you, perhaps, not having your eyes befuddled with
the rose-fog of romance, will see too clearly to believe. What can I
adduce for your conviction? The facts only. After all, that is the
single strength of my position.

There was, of course, the strange forehanded, subtle planning of the
other girl, of Janet Spencer. Why did she do it? Was it that,
feeling her chances in Tawnleytown so few, counting the soil there
so barren, driven by an ambition beyond the imagination of staid,
stodgy, normal Tawnleytown girls, she felt she must create
opportunities where none were? She was very lovely, Harber tells me,
in a fiery rose-red of the fairy-tale way; though even without
beauty it needn't have been hard for her. Young blood is prone
enough to adventure; the merest spark will set it akindle. I should
like to have known that girl. She must have been very clever. Because,
of course, she couldn't have foreseen, even by the surest instinct,
the coincidence that brought Harber and Barton together. Yes, there
is a coincidence in it. It's precisely upon that, you see, that
Harber hangs his belief.

I wonder, too, how many of those argosies she sent out seeking the
golden fleece returned to her? It's a fine point for speculation. If
one only knew.... ah, but it's pitiful how much one doesn't, and
can't, know in this hard and complex world! Or was it merely that
she tired of them and wanted to be rid of them? Or again, do I wrong
her there, and were there no more than the two of them, and did she
simply suffer a solitary revulsion of feeling, as Harber did? But no,
I'm sure I'm right in supposing Barton and Harber to have been but
two ventures out of many, two arrows out of a full quiver shot in
the dark at the bull's-eye of fortune. And, by heaven, it was
splendid shooting ... even if none of the other arrows scored!

Harber tells me he was ripe for the thing without any encouragement
to speak of. Tawnleytown was dull plodding for hot youth. Half
hidden in the green of fir and oak and maple, slumberous with
midsummer heat, it lay when he left it. Thickly powdered with the
fine white dust of its own unpaven streets, dust that sent the
inhabitants chronically sneezing and weeping and red-eyed about town,
or sent them north to the lakes for exemption, dust that hung
impalpably suspended in the still air and turned the sunsets to
things of glorious rose and red and gold though there wasn't a single
cloud or streamer in the sky to catch the light, dust that lay upon
lawns and walks and houses in deep gray accumulation ... precisely
as if these were objects put away and never used and not disturbed
until they were white with the inevitable powdery accretion that
accompanies disuse. Indeed, he felt that way about Tawnleytown, as
if it were a closed room of the world, a room of long ago, unused now,
unimportant, forgotten.

So unquestionably he was ready enough to go. He had all the fine and
far-flung dreams of surging youth. He peopled the world with his
fancies, built castles on every high hill. He felt the urge of
ambition fiercely stirring within him, latent power pulsing through
him. What would you? Wasn't he young and in love?

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