Page:Weird Tales Volume 13 Number 06 (1929-06).djvu/94

tion of my spirits, accounted for my being on that creek in my boat that late afternoon in September. I had not returned to the government camp with my fellow workers, but had turned my boat seaward and had by the time the storm broke gone miles farther than any of us had been before. It was not a pleasant work in which we were engaged—this discouraging search for the breeding-place of an insect that was destroying millions of dollars' worth of crops annually—but someone had to do it, and the bureau had selected me to head the investigation.

My first intimation of the nearness of the storm came with a crash of thunder that followed hard upon the most tremendous lightning stroke I ever saw. The very heavens seemed to split asunder and the echo of the thunder rolled almost endlessly against the gray, forbidding horizon. Then came the rain, a typical South Carolina coast rain—the beating sheets of gray water of those dreary savannahs.

I turned my boat about and began poling furiously upstream. Somewhere, I remembered, along the creek was a shack that had been pointed out to me as the habitation of an old beachcomber and odd-job man of the neighboring town. I searched the landscape as I moved sluggishly up the stream. It was difficult to see any great distance through the gray avalanche of rain. But at last I espied the shack set back about fifty yards from the marshy bank of the creek. I shunted the boat into the bank, tied it to a clump of small willows, and raced up the path toward the shelter of the shack.

When I entered—the door was not locked, and I pushed it open without ceremony—the old man was kneeling before the open hearth lighting a fire of grasses and driftwood. He turned his face when I entered and said—with a note of petulance, I thought—"The hospitality of necessity."

"I shall not trouble you long—only until the storm is over;" I told him. "It is not pleasant punting along in the pouring rain. And then, the lightning, you know."

"Oh, you're welcome, as far as that goes," he sa'd, in that whining, creaking voice that is so often an affectation of the aged. "Nobody can ever say that Sailor Jack ever turned a needy man from his door."

He motioned me to take one of the two chairs with which the room was furnished, but I stood for a moment or so in the doorway under a small sheltering awning of planks so that I might not wet the floor more than I could help.

"Don't mind the water," he said. "Come on in and dry yourself by the fire."

I complied, and when I was seated I looked about the room. I had heard many tales of Sailor Jack—tales the town folk didn't believe—old sailor myths he'd strewn through the district. People wondered how he managed to live on the little work he got to do.

In the room were two bunks, one above the other, sailor fashion, and in a corner an old chest of black, carved wood. In a room at the back I could see a skillet hanging from a nail and a small iron stove in which a fire was already lighted. A coffee-pot was bubbling and the faint aroma of good strong coffee came to my nostrils. A cup of coffee, I decided, would be just the thing to take the sudden chill from my body.

Evidently Sailor Jack thought so, too, because I saw him go into the kitchen and pour a cup from the pot. He was very old, was Sailor Jack. His face was wrinkled like old parchment, and his beard and hair were streaked with a yellowish tinge. The beard was splashed with brown stains from the lips to the tip of the white straggly growth. His eyes were "hollows of madness." Upon his head was a curiously shaped blue cap, some-