Public-domain ebook
The sureness of MacKenzie
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In: Short Stories·Adventure·American Literature
Public-domain ebook sourced from Project Gutenberg #76821.
The opening · free to read
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.”
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