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Title: The sureness of MacKenzie
Author: Frederick R. Bechdolt
Release date: September 4, 2025 [eBook #76821]
Language: English
Original publication: New York: Street & Smith Corporation, 1923
Credits: Roger Frank and Sue Clark
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SURENESS OF MACKENZIE ***
The Sureness of MacKenzie
By Frederick R. Bechdolt
Author of "The Fight of the Lone Pass," "Under Sealed Orders," etc.
An epic of the hill wind and fog. A story of thrills; and,
when you think it's over, and read this story, you'll agree
with Bechdolt that there are few jobs more crowded with
thrills than that of the pilot who essays to bring a big
liner into port in a fog so thick that it obscures the decks.
The hill wind and the fog raced down from Tamalpais’ crest to the inner
portal of the Golden Gate. While the great sirens shook the living rock
on either side with their hoarse warnings, these two lingered briefly
in the steep-walled place. It was like the last conference of stealthy
thugs at the scene of their projected crime. For to-morrow they were to
bring the thing to pass.
Even now the _Empress_ was facing straight toward the spot. Far out of
sea she came, unswerving as though, disdainful of the plotting elements
and imbued with absolute, abiding faith in man, she knew that her pilot
was at this moment being summoned forth to the place where he would
meet her.
The ringing of the telephone bell in the hallway was the first
indication MacKenzie got of the impending task. He rose deliberately
from his morris chair and strode out to answer. He was a
wide-shouldered man whose weather-stained face was out of harmony with
his well-tailored business suit. There was assertion in the very manner
of his setting down his feet; his bushy, gray brows seemed to grow
heavier as he neared the instrument. When he had taken down the
receiver, he roared the salutation in his quarter-deck voice, and his
“Hello!” made the windows rattle in the sitting room, where his wife
was leaning forward, hearkening.
“All right.... Four o’clock.... Good-by.” He shouted each answer like
an order.
His wife dropped the two dolls over which she had been smiling before
the interruption, and a shadow came into her eyes. “You’re going to be
away over the twins’ birthday.” Her voice made it like an accusation.
“I’ve got to go out inside of an hour.” He turned his back on those
dolls which he had been fondly fingering five minutes ago, and he took
down from its hook behind the door a file of the _Guide_. He scanned
the first column’s closely printed list of homing vessels. “Two men out
there ahead of me,” he said thoughtfully. “Let’s see.”
When he had replaced the papers--“It’s all right, Annie; I’ll come home
on the _Empress_ to-morrow afternoon.” He made the announcement as
positively as though the Asiatic liner were a street car; and then,
with his last half hour at home before him, he went on mapping out the
details of to-morrow evening’s festivities which they had planned in
honor of their two grandchildren. He spoke with a confidence, as if
there were five-o’clock whistles to call him home from his work on the
high seas. But his wife made no move to pick up the two presents, which
she herself had dressed in bright raiment; she sat still, gazing with
patient eyes upon the leaping flames in the grate. Thirty years of
married experience had planted in her soul abiding distrust concerning
ocean home-comings.
“After dinner,” he was saying placidly, “we’ll all come back to the
sitting room; and we’ll have them here”--he pointed to the center
table--“so they’ll see them as quick as they come through the door.” He
heard her sigh.
“Annie, I tell you I’ll be back on the _Empress_ in good time.” He made
the statement as if its very utterance established it--a fact beyond
all doubt or contradiction. He waved his large right hand in a gesture
whose abruptness caused the tattooed dragon on his forearm to thrust
its red-and-blue head out from under his spotless linen cuff.
“Now that’s settled, lass. And be sure to remember the candles for the
birthday cakes. Two cakes; same size; and the candles set in exactly
the same.” He sighed comfortably in the depths of the leather-cushioned
chair, and he talked on. There was fondness in his face now; it had
come there when he called her “lass.”
* * * * *
A half hour later he elbowed his way through the hurrying throngs of
homebound commuters in front of the ferry building, and climbed the
stairs. In the office of the Bar Pilots’ Association, he found two
fellow members just back from outside the Heads, immaculately
overcoated, their shoes agleam with polish, bulky men, gray-haired.
They talked with MacKenzie of tide and wind and pitfalls of the deep as
workman talks to workman at the changing of the shifts. He nodded and
answered tersely as he went on tying up the evening papers into a round
bundle to take with him to the pilot boat.
He glanced at the blackboard beside the secretary’s desk. Under the
head of “Remarks” he read:
Thick Outside.
Sou’west Swell.
Breaking Bar.
These tidings, which would have forced a coastwise skipper to relieve
his tense nerves by profanity, he accepted without comment. The fog and
breakers brought him his bread and butter, after all. He saw the names
of the pilots out there ahead of him. “Lea and Wills,” he chuckled.
“They’re both of them always worrying for fear they won’t get ships
back home.”
“How about you?” the secretary demanded.
“There’ll be ships enough, all right, to bring us all back before
to-morrow evening,” he said, and departed.
He boarded the Bar Pilots’ Association tender at Meiggs Wharf, and
stood on the low deck as the swift little craft steamed out through the
inner portal of the Golden Gate with a seven-knot ebb pushing on her
stern.
And now, just after the tug had passed Fort Point, the hill wind and
the fog leaped down the Marin County slopes again, hand in hand--like
two murderers coming to take a look at their intended victim as he goes
by the appointed spot. The Lime Point siren bellowed after MacKenzie in
hoarse warning, and he glanced behind him as the pair fled up the
mountain. “Came on thick there for a minute,” he remarked to the man at
the wheel, and turned his eyes ahead.
Where Point Bonita thrusts its fangs into the Pacific, the helmsman
turned the little craft squarely to the right, for the bar was breaking
to that southwest swell, and, jockeying the swirling currents, brought
her safely into the entrance of North Channel. Between the breakers of
the shoal and the surf at the foot of the cliffs, she went until she
rocked on the bosom of the open sea; then, as she neared the lightship,
MacKenzie saw the pilot boat careening out to meet him like a swooping
gull.
* * * * *
The rising sea was but a herald of a remote gale; there was scant
breeze; the gray mists marked a perfect circle on the tossing ocean. In
the center of this a speck of white under the apex of a drab dome, the
pilot boat lay. Her spray-laved deck glinted dully, deserted now by all
save her helmsman. Through the thick curtain of the mists he heard the
lightship’s lonely roaring, the muffled moan of breakers on the bar,
the constant whispering of a myriad hoary billows yearning toward the
lowering heavens. Among these sounds he hearkened for another, and
peered into the murk, watching, listening for the first far sign of
some homing ship.
Down in the cabin, MacKenzie and his two companions were killing with
the gossip of the seven seas the time which separated them from home.
They were talking of the long, blind trails which reach from the
uttermost parts of the world, converging on this troubled patch of
water, and of the ships that traveled by these pathways to the Golden
Gate.
The engines had stopped; the schooner was under sail; and in the pauses
of their conversation the sounds of the ship and the sea came into the
cabin--the rattle of a shifting block from overhead, the intermittent
gurgle of the water alongside, and at intervals out of the surrounding
depths the faint, clinking toll of the lightship’s submarine bell.
MacKenzie lay on one of the red, upholstered lockers which extended the
length of the cabin under the tiers of bunks on either side; he had
changed his neat shore raiment for rough sea clothes. The other two, in
similar attire, were seated at the wide table in the middle of the
room. Lea, black-browed, swarthy as some old-time pirate, was hammering
the table with his fist to emphasize his assertions. Old Wills wagged
his white beard against the flaming background of a scarlet flannel
undershirt, announcing every conclusion with slow placidity.
“There’s that Standard tanker,” he was saying; “from Honolulu, and----”
“The _Empress_,” Lea interrupted loudly. “And they’re all that’s coming
in to-morrow. Sorry for you, Dan.”
“I’ll get the _Empress_.” MacKenzie made the announcement as positively
as though it were an order.
Wills turned with the deliberation which his extensive girth demanded
until he faced MacKenzie, and his snowy whiskers swept to and fro
against the sanguinary background, as he shook his head. “Don’t you be
so blame sure, now,” he said slowly.
As one who sums up judgment, MacKenzie spoke, and with a certainty, as
though he were at this moment gazing beyond the curtain of the fog over
the earth’s curve: “That overdue Frenchman is heading for the Farallons
now. ’Twas him the _Hazel Dollar_ sighted yesterday and reported with
his topmasts gone. But unless there’s more air stirrin’ out there than
there is here, he won’t be in till after daybreak.”
“That bark the _Dollar_ sighted was bound for Puget Sound.” Lea thumped
the table. “The Frenchman’s lost.”
Wills joined him, and their voices mingled for some moments; the names
of ships and far ports flew thick and fast; the cabin resounded with
strange words by which local tempests are called down the west coast.
MacKenzie remained silent until they had concluded. Then----
“I’m right,” he reiterated.
Lea swore at him with the deep fervency which time-tried shipmates can
use in their profanity when they apply it to one another. Old Wills
turned laboriously to face him once more.
“Dan”--his voice was heavy with solemnity--“you’re always this way. You
can’t even pass the time o’ day with a man without you got to be so
dead sure about the thing. It ain’t right, I tell you.”
“Now listen, Dan,” Lea cut in. “You got to change your mind once in a
while.”
MacKenzie shook his head. “I know when I’m right,” he said
aggressively.
“Supposing you was wrong?” Wills demanded.
“I ain’t wrong,” MacKenzie announced, in the same sure tone. “I know
when I’m right, I tell you. I’d be no pilot if I didn’t know that.”
Lea swore again, and the fervency of despair was in his voice now.
“Come, Jim,” he told Wills, and picked up the cards which were lying in
front of him on the table, “I’ll play you a game of pinochle.”
MacKenzie watched them from the locker for a good half hour; then went
on deck, for the third man out has the task of cruising. He stood in
the narrow cockpit, talking with the helmsman about the rising sea and
the chances of the fog clearing away. But before he left for the
cabin--“Keep her pretty well out toward the lightship,” he said
quietly. “That Standard tanker’s due to-night, and that French bark at
almost any time.”
* * * * *
In the dark hour before the dawn, the helmsman sighted the huge oil
carrier--a blurred pin point of light emerging through the night mists,
miles away--and he kindled the torch to signal her. As he waved the
flaring beacon to and from its buzzing awakened the three sleepers in
the cabin, and they saw the crimson glare spilling down the
companionway.
“Good ship for you, cap’n!” The sailor’s hoarse announcement was
followed by the tramp of his feet on the deck as he hurried forward to
awaken his companions.
MacKenzie came up to take the wheel, and while he signaled for the
engines he could hear old Wills stamping about the cabin to assemble
his store clothes. Shortly before the launching of the yawl, Wills
appeared, all evidences of that piratical undershirt extinguished
beneath starched linen and black broadcloth. He hurried to the main
rigging as the boat left the skids, and he hung there by the manropes,
awaiting a safe moment when he could lower his two hundred and
sixty-odd pounds into the pitching craft without bringing disaster.
“Good luck!” MacKenzie called from the cockpit. “Tell them if there’s
nothing better sailing they’d better send some one out here on the
tender, for I’ll be in on the _Empress_.”
Wills disappeared; and some moments later his voice floated upward from
the darkened waters: “You always got to be so blame sure, Dan!”
MacKenzie’s face remained impassive as that final rebuke reached him;
and hours later, when he had hastened up into the wan dawn, responding
to the helmsman’s summons, his features wore no sign of triumph as he
handed the glasses to Lea, pointing into the southwest. Through the fog
the lenses picked up a gleaming, white bulk, like the specter of a
remote tower which has been razed near its summit; and as that ghostly
form stole on, looming larger through the damp mists, the binoculars
discovered the black speck that crawled on before it.
“Tops’ls gone,” MacKenzie announced indifferently. “And there’s the
tug. Your Frenchman, Jack.”
“I guess you’re right.” Lea shook his head as he hurried below to
change his clothes.
“O’ course I’m right,” MacKenzie told him placidly; “I knew that all
along.”
* * * * *
Noon passed. The fog, which had been lifting for several hours, crawled
up the great, tawny ridges where Tamalpais rises from the sea until it
found upon the mountain’s flanks the ancient rendezvous where it had
often met the hill wind. Here it bided the approaching hour when they
would meet again, to descend hand in hand to the inner portal of the
Golden Gate and bring to pass the thing for which they had been
preparing.
When the _Empress_ thrust her steep, black prow over the earth’s bulge,
the circle had widened about the pilot boat until its drab
circumference inclosed the headlands to the northeast and racing crests
far beyond the silent, red-hulled lightship. The bar’s entire shape was
projected upon the waters in a vivid horseshoe-shaped smear of white,
to which the towering billows raced, whispering. As they reached it,
blanching in the instant, they leaped, roaring, amid a myriad snarling
predecessors. From the lurching deck MacKenzie sniffed the keen,
primeval tang of seaweed uptorn from the depths; and he gazed seaward
at the liner’s smoke, a filament of brown, infinitesimal on the somber
heavens.
“Raise the jack!” he ordered.
A sailor pulled the star-flecked banner to the masthead; and over the
horizon, across the wild reaches of the ocean, the homing steamship and
the little schooner spoke their greetings, flag for flag.
When they had drawn within a quarter of a mile of each other, the yawl
slid from the skids into the hissing waters; the sailors sprang like
cats between the thwarts; MacKenzie chose the next propitious instant,
and followed them. They coasted from the summits of the gray-green
billows into swirling troughs, shut off from all the world by rushing,
foam-patched hills; they gained the lee of the biding liner. Her black
side arose above them like the wall of a high building.
From the summit of that wall the slender Jacob’s ladder dangled, now
touching the edge of a rising wave, now receding skyward as the
steamship rolled, showing her red belly.
There came a moment when the _Empress_ settled toward the yawl, and the
little boat rose as if to meet her. The sailors grunted at the oars;
the yawl rushed broadside toward the lowering bulk. MacKenzie leaned
forward in the stern sheets.
The moment crystallized into a fleeting instant. The yawl was rising,
the ship still descending; the end of the Jacob’s ladder hung within a
few feet. Immediately that entire movement changed, and the ladder was
swept away from the retreating boat.
But in the passing of that instant, as one who casts behind him all
else upon the seizing of swift-racing opportunity, MacKenzie rose and
leaped. Out of the boat against the reeling steel wall he sprang; he
gripped the ladder’s sides with both strong hands and found the step
which lay unseen beneath him. Already the oarsmen were pulling off to
safety; through the black plates he heard the clanging of the gong down
in the engine room. He climbed up and gained the deck.
Awaiting him, the skipper stood upon the bridge, tall in his spotless
uniform of navy blue, grizzled, austere on this far height with all his
ship beneath him. The days and nights of lonely mastery, when every
movement of that enormous structure, every revolution throughout its
complicated mechanism, and every act among those hundreds on board were
his to answer for; those days and nights were over now. In these two
remaining hours, when he faced the climax of that struggle against the
elements into which every voyage resolves itself, the law had given him
a companion. As he had looked upon the land whose imminence is the
final ordeal for every deep-water captain, he had seen approaching him
the only man who had a right to share his responsibility without taking
his orders. And now, as MacKenzie gained the bridge and these two
exchanged greetings, each called the other by his title, captain.
MacKenzie looked into the northeast, appraising the hostile
elements--the raging breakers on the bar, the swirling currents hidden
in North Channel, the headlands ravenous for wreckage, the gray fog
that clung to the slopes above them. Striving to read from their aspect
the signs of any conspiracy against this ship, whose safety was his
trust now, he studied the fog longer than all the others; he watched
for any movement which might betray the connivance of the treacherous
hill wind. But the fog remained motionless on the heights.
He spoke; the great liner turned under his feet. From the red-hulled
lightship she departed northward and a little to the east, and she left
the distant harbor entrance to the right of her foaming wake. For seven
miles she traveled, skirting the outside of the roaring bar, until she
had passed the curve where the horseshoe hooks inward parallel to the
land. Here she reached an unmarked spot on the tumbling waters which
MacKenzie knew as well as a landsman knows his own doorstep. Again he
spoke; the huge bulk swerved as obediently as a living creature, found
the new course, and plunged down North Channel with the Potato Patch
roaring on her right, and on her left the surf under the ringing
cliffs. Between these bounds, which narrowed as the ship went on, he
guided her, while the great, green seas hammered her forward deck and
hidden currents strove desperately against her keel, now fighting to
drive her on the rocks and now to drag her upon the shoal. Four miles,
and then she shook the last hampering deluge from her bows as she
emerged between Bonita’s teeth and the last bar buoy.
At the outer entrance of the Golden Gate she lingered for a moment, as
one who hesitates before plunging into a final peril.
From the lofty bridge MacKenzie peered up the funnel-shaped lane whose
narrow end opens between steep cliffs into the harbor. He looked into
the bay and searched the hillsides above the Marin County precipices
for any sign of downward movement in the fog. This was the last chance
to stop until she passed through the neck of the funnel--between Fort
Point and Lime Point. The gray fog was still motionless up there on the
slopes. He uttered an order; the _Empress_ started on.
She passed Mile Rock far over to her right. More than two miles ahead
of her, at the edge of the point which has been named for it, the grim
old black fort, with its rows of loopholes, stood out clearly. Across
the narrow channel from it, the Lime Point Lighthouse gleamed white
upon its rocky headland.
Under MacKenzie’s feet the decks were astir with men and women. Some
were rushing to and fro in a fervor of final packing; others stood at
the rail, gazing eagerly at the first evidences of the city; all were
radiant with the expectancy of their home-coming. Back and forth among
them stewards hurried on a multitude of errands; Chinese deck boys
slipped unostentatiously in and out through the crowd; the noise of
many tongues arose on all sides. Up here, remote from all that bustle,
in the lonely place of responsibility, MacKenzie stood motionless; the
captain paced back and forth close by, but spoke no word to him.
Then the fog seemed to fall from the hillsides upon the ship, it came
so suddenly.
A thick, damp grayness cut off the bridge from everything; it obscured
the decks; the bows were only a faint blur. The land vanished. The
_Empress_ was traveling on a little circle of dark waters over whose
surface hoary shreds of mist were trailing; a circle whose
circumference moved as the ship moved, whose area remained unchanged,
without the slightest sound of anything beyond.
Out of that gray mystery great voices came, deep-toned, reverberating
as in horror of the tidings which they proclaimed. The sirens were
bellowing their brazen warnings to the ship, and the living rock
trembled as they called their stern commands to keep away or die.
The ship went on; she must pass through the narrows before she could
stop again. She was no longer steaming proudly in; she crept as one who
has been stricken blind and feels her way; out of mid-channel toward
the Marin County shore--MacKenzie was able to bring her that far while
the fog was descending--and now she crawled along under the lofty
hills. The passengers had left her decks; there were no signs of life
save for the lookout hidden in the murk that cloaked the bows, and the
two men on the bridge. The captain’s face had grown tense, and as he
paced back and forth he glanced often at MacKenzie. But MacKenzie stood
motionless, and there was no sign of feeling on his face.
He was looking down upon that little circle of dark waters over which
the hoary filaments of mist were drifting. He was reading its
secrets--the movement of the tide, the direction of the swirling
currents, the strength with which they were pushing upon the liner’s
submerged keel.
He was listening to the sounds in the gray fog--the whistle of the
_Empress_, appealing hoarsely for guidance; the echoes with which the
steep Marin County hills answered that appeal; the crashing blare of
the Fort Point diaphone over to the right. These things and a strange
sixth sense of locality which had come through long experience gave
MacKenzie a picture.
In his mind’s eye he saw beyond the limits of that little circle on the
dark waters. He saw the ship and her surroundings as he would on a
clear day.
That mental vision portrayed the liner, now entering the neck of the
funnel-shaped lane, approaching close to the inner portal of the Golden
Gate. Close beside her it showed the Marin County hills, rising
straight from the water; before her bows, barring the way with its rock
walls, Lime Point; across the narrow channel from this--ahead and to
his right--Fort Point.
That was the picture. The echoes came down from the hills; the Lime
Point siren roared straight ahead of him; and over there to the right
the Fort Point diaphone was bellowing like a hundred fear-maddened
bulls. The ship crept on.
In his mind’s eye MacKenzie saw the steep, black prow approaching Lime
Point--until, within a minute, he must say the word which would compel
the _Empress_ to turn to the right in order to avoid the rocky
promotory as she passed through the narrows.
Then a strange and terrible change came.
The echoes from the steep hills dwindled and died away. The roaring of
the Lime Point siren grew fainter, more remote, as if the ship were
being shoved off to the right. The crashing diapason from Fort Point
was growing with appalling suddenness.
At this same moment the color of the waters which swirled against the
steel flanks of the _Empress_ deepened to a turgid brown. The ebb tide
was rushing seaward.
The captain halted abruptly. His tall form was erect no longer; he
leaned forward, and his face was pallid as he peered into the fog
toward the spot from which that diaphone’s blare emerged.
In the instant, MacKenzie became rigid. He stood like a grim statue.
His shaggy brows seemed to hide the eyes beneath them. Under his heavy,
gray mustache his lips pressed tightly together. And he asked himself a
question:
Had he erred?
If he had--if in the painting of that mental picture he had been
mistaken--by a quarter of a mile in distance, by two minutes in
time--this seven-knot ebb tide would be carrying the liner far over to
her right. She would be steaming toward Fort Point. It had occurred
once. Another ship, laden, like this one, with hundreds of men and
women, had been swung off her course in a fog by the ebb tide, lusty
with freshet waters, and driven on those rocks. The bones of that ship
lay somewhere on the bottom mingled with the skeletons of her
passengers.
Two minutes! And that narrow interval of time depended to a hair upon
the superiority of the _Empress’_ throbbing propellers over the
opposition of the waters. What man could measure the results of that
struggle down there under the surface? Or tell to exactness what might
the currents were putting forth to-day?
The hillsides gave no echo now. The Lime Point siren died away
entirely. The Fort Point diaphone crashed louder. The minute at whose
expiration MacKenzie had intended to speak the word by which the liner
would turn reached its final second. He put that question by. He had
made his calculation in the beginning.
Now he spoke. The ship turned.
Her bow swung toward Fort Point; she steamed straight into that blaring
warning as if she were defying it.
Her captain sprang toward MacKenzie; his right hand was upraised in a
gesture of terrible protest; he was sweating; great beads of water
stood out on his forehead. “Man!” he shouted hoarsely. “The current!
Can’t you see?” He pointed frantically into the din of the diaphone as
though it were a visible thing. “Can’t you hear? You’re piling her up
on Fort Point!”
MacKenzie stood rigid. His head was thrust forward as if he were
straining to listen for some other sound than that reverberating
thunder which was overwhelming the entire ship; as if in this moment he
were hoping to catch some shred of noise from the Lime Point siren in
the place where he had pictured it. But there was no answer from that
quarter.
The _Empress_ kept on turning. Over her bows now, nearer, louder,
terrible in volume and intensity, Fort Point’s warning came. The
captain leaped in front of MacKenzie. His hand flew out toward the
marine telegraph.
“Stop her!” His voice was heavy with horror.
MacKenzie seized the captain’s arm, and his fingers were like iron as
he pulled it back from the handle of the telegraph. There was a sharp
struggle; the captain tore away from him and whirled toward the man at
the wheel. His lips parted; but even as he uttered the first word of
that order to alter her course, MacKenzie drowned that order with his
own deep-voiced command:
“Keep her headed as she is now!”
Then, as the ship moved on into the grayness, while the blare from Fort
Point welled straight above her lofty prow, the captain groaned and
clutched the rail instinctively, as though to save himself against the
impact of the collision with those rocks.
In that final instant the fog, like a faint-hearted conspirator who
gives up and flees before his companions, began to retreat up the slope
toward the distant mountain. But the hill wind remained stubborn. So,
as MacKenzie touched the captain on the shoulder, pointing over there
straight to their left, they gazed upon the ragged rocks from which her
pilot had preserved the ship, and they saw the pallid jets of steam
emanating from the siren behind the white lighthouse; but as yet they
could hear nothing of the warning which the siren bellowed.
On her beam now; and now it receded to her quarter; and now the
_Empress_ had passed the place into the channel. The harbor showed
clear before her bows; the sunlight was flecking the waters. MacKenzie
moved his hand upon the lever of the telegraph, and the great liner
ceased that creeping to resume her proud pace toward the wharves.
* * * * *
“It was that wind in the hills,” MacKenzie told the secretary in the
office of the Bar Pilots’ Association, while he was leaving the order
for fees which the captain had signed. “Come on thick for a few
minutes, John; and just as I got her under Lime Point that wind played
a dirty trick on me. Lime Point siren kept carrying off toward the
mountain somewheres, and Fort Point came on so loud you couldn’t hear
another thing. For a minute they had me pretty near to guessing. I’d of
been in trouble--if I hadn’t been sure o’ my bearings.”
Which was all the comment that he made, for he was in a hurry to get
home for that birthday festival.
At home, he rested as a good workman should rest. He shook off that sea
harshness of his; his voice was gentle as he played with his
grandchildren. He dispensed with that quarter-deck authoritativeness;
he became the slave of the whole shrieking brood and did their smallest
bidding. As if it were wearisome now, he forsook that calmness which he
had worn while he was dealing with the hostile elements; he fairly
trembled with nervousness when he stole into the sitting room to place
the two dolls on the center table, so fearful was he lest one of the
twins would catch him at it.
But there was a thing which he could not shake off, a trait which had
fastened itself too firmly during his hours of facing the unexpected.
One of his daughters mentioned it to her mother at the close of the
evening, after the children had been put to bed, and while the rest of
them were talking in front of the fire. MacKenzie was arguing with his
two sons-in-law.
“Don’t you go quoting government statistics at me,” he was saying
implacably; “I don’t care what they say; I’m right!”
His daughter’s voice was full of amused tolerance as she spoke to her
mother: “He is _so_ sure!”
And if the elements were--as men of old believed them--gifted with the
power of speech, there is no doubt that on their next meeting at the
inner portal of the Golden Gate the hill wind and the fog would have
echoed that sentiment.
[Transcriber’s Note: This story appeared in the January 5, 1923 issue
of _Sea Stories_ magazine.]
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