A Desperate Bridegroom

CHAPTER I. A laggard

“YOU'VE heard about the ship that went down in sight of port?” observed Clyde Maxwell. “Well, for sheer bad luck, I've got that ship looking like a golden argosy of joy. And this I am sure I can show you.”

“Is it a matter of life and death?” asked the purser.

“Life and death? Worse!”

“I wish I could help you out,” said the purser, watching the tall, ulster-clad man with a new interest. “Is it—is it anything you'd care to tell me about? Not that I've got any authority to help you out,” he added as a cautious afterthought. “I've explained that to you already.”

“You certainly have. So has the captain. So has the health officer. So has everybody in sight. You're an exception to the rest, in one way—you're the only soul on the ship who has shown the faintest interest in my possible reasons for wanting to get ashore. The rest all—”

“You say it's 'worse than a matter of life and death,'” explained the purser; “so I suppose it's something with a story to it. That's why I asked. That and because you and I have been good friends since the old business college days. But if you'd rather not tell—”

“It's a relief to jabber it to some one. Here goes. I told you I was engaged. Well, I'm on my way home to my wedding. The date set for it is March 1st—day after to-morrow. I had to make this European trip for the firm. The ship was scheduled to dock at New York on February 25th—two days ago. I figured out that I'd have fully three days' leeway. Then came the broken shaft that delayed us two days, and, now that we've struck quarantine, comes this diphtheria scare. And we're all held up, by law, for two days longer, till they find out whether there'll be any more cases to—”

“I get the idea. You're liable to be late for your wedding. Hard luck! But you can send the girl word by wireless, can't you? She'll surely understand. In two days you'll be able to land. Let's see. This is February 27th. Twenty-eight days in February, aren't there? Two days after this will—will bring it up to March 2d. The wedding need be put off only one day. And—”

“You don't understand,” cried Maxwell.

“That has nothing to do with it. Here's the idea. Miss Sylvia Tennant—the girl I'm going to marry—is my third cousin. I've known her since she was a child. We've always been in love with each other. Our families always favored the match—especially her grandfather. He died last year, leaving six hundred and twenty thousand dollars. According to his will, the money was to be divided equally between Sylvia and myself—”

“Good old grandpa!” put in the purser.

“On condition,” resumed Clyde, “that we marry each other on or before her twenty-first birthday. A fool sort of a will, wasn't it? But his heart was set on the match. And he didn't believe in long engagements.”

“Nobody would believe in them,” chuckled the purser, “if there was six hundred and twenty thousand dollars waiting at their end. You're a lucky chap, Maxwell. For a struggling young lawyer to come into three hundred and ten thousand dollars, and to marry a girl with the same amount of wealth, seems almost too good to be true.”

“It is too good to be true,” groaned Clyde. “That's the trouble. I might have known it could never happen. I'm the original Jonah from Jonahopolis.”

“Hasn't thrown you over, has she?”

“No, but—”

“She won't be silly enough to break the engagement, just because you're held up a couple days on a quarantined boat?”

“No, no! But her twenty-first birthday; falls on the 1st of March. That's all. Now, do you, see?”

The purser whistled long and reflectively.

“I understand!” he exclaimed. “You are in bad, for a fact. The wedding scheduled for March 1st, a fortune depending on it, and you booked to get to town one day late. Say! I've got an idea. Why not send for Miss. Tennant to come down here and marry you on shipboard? That would—”

“That would be fine!” scoffed Maxwell. “Only, you seem to forget no one but health officers are allowed to board the ship or to leave it. I believe the law even forbids any private boats to come within a hundred feet of us. So there we are.”

“But, can't the will be set aside, or—”

“No. We all agreed to it, and it has been probated. Unless Sylvia and I are married day after to-morrow, the six hundred and twenty thousand dollars reverts to the Something-or-Other Charitable Gild. The old chap wasn't really so much of a crank, though, as you might think.

“He knew Sylvia and I were in love with each other. He knew I was too hard up to marry. He knew I would be too proud, as a poor man, to marry an heiress. So he divided the money between us, and made that little proviso against a long engagement. It all seemed for the best.

“And it would have been, if I hadn't got delayed on this confounded old floating hospital of a broken-down liner.”

“Easy—easy, old man!” laughed the purser. “Remember, I'm supposed to have a certain amount of loyalty for the ship, and I don't enjoy hearing her roasted like that. It's your own fault you're in such a hole. Why did you wait so long? If I'd been in your shoes, I'd have been married on the very day the will was read. I wouldn't have waited till the eleventh hour and taken chances on some accident like this.”

“We planned to marry two months ago—just before I sailed for England. She was coming with me for a wedding trip. But her mother fell ill, and we had to postpone the wedding for her sake. Don't rub it in. I'm so sore I wish I had a third foot to kick myself with. Here I'm robbing the girl I love. I don't mind my own loss. I can always earn some sort of a living. But to think I'm making her lose a fortune! I'm not going to do it, either!” he went on fiercely.

“What are you going to do about it?”

“Do about it? I've nearly forty-eight hours left. We are at anchor off Staten Island, not a quarter of a mile from shore. Ferries are running between Staten Island and New York every few minutes. In one hour from now I could be at Sylvia Tennant's door. I could be with the girl I love, and I could save six hundred and twenty thousand dollars—all in one hour. Do you think I'll lose that chance for the sake of all the quarantine that ever happened? Not I.”

“And perhaps carry diphtheria germs to her by way of a wedding present?”

“Nonsense! The health officer himself says it's probably only tonsilitis; and even if it's something worse, all the half-dozen cases are in the steerage or the second cabin. I haven't been brought into contact with any of them. It's worth the risk. And I'm going to try it.”

“How?” queried the purser, with incredulous amusement.

“If you ask as an officer of the ship, it's none of your business. If you ask as a friend, I don't know. Hallo! I thought no private craft were allowed alongside.”

The two men were leaning over the vessel's port-rail, their gaze fixed on the hilly shores of Staten Island. From the Rosebank wharf at natty white launch had chugged out into the gray, ice-strewn water. It was now nearing the vessel, and “rounded to” at the foot of the hanging companion-ladder.

Several men, members of the crew, were lugging one or two trunks to the companionway. Just behind them, escorted by the obsequious captain, walked a portly, middle-aged man.

“Isn't that the chap you pointed out to me yesterday as old McCue, president of the Bird Seed Trust?” asked Clyde.

“That's the man,” assented the purser. “Don't you envy him? He's to be an exception to the rule that holds the rest of us here. By special permission. You see, he's one of the directors of the line, and— Where are you going?”

Maxwell had left his friend, and was racing across the twilight deck. He halted in front of the captain and McCue as they reached the head of the companionway.

“Pardon me, Mr. McCue,” he began. “I am to be married March 1st. A fortune depends on it. May I go ashore with you? I will pay for my—”

“Step back!” thundered the captain, aghast that an ordinary passenger should dare accost the great Bird Seed Trust president. “Stand free of that gangway!”

“Mr. McCue,” implored Maxwell, “I beg you will take me along. It is necessary—much depends on—”

He got no further. A shove from the captain pushed him away from the gangway. And Mr. McCue, balanced by two sailors, had begun his descent of the ladder. Before Clyde could recover his lost ground, the bird seed magnate had entered his launch, and the little craft was puffing shoreward.

“What d'ye mean by interfering like that?” snarled the captain, glowering at Maxwell.

“What do you mean by letting one man break quarantine, and not another?” snapped Clyde. “McCue can carry infection to the land as well as I can. Besides, if he can go, why can't I?”

“I don't wish to argue with you, young man,” said the captain loftily as he moved away.

“You won't get the chance,” retorted Maxwell; “for I'm going to leave this ship, by fair means or foul.”

“If I hear any more threats of that sort from you,” howled the captain, “I'll put you in irons! You'd have me fined or suspended, would you, for letting you go ashore in defiance of the health officer's orders, and maybe spread disease germs all over New York? I'll have you ironed if you make one attempt to—”

“Very good!” shouted Clyde, reckless with impotent fury as he shook aside the heavy ulster. “Try it, if you can! I'm off!”

With one hand on the rail, Maxwell vaulted over the side, kicked his heel against the projecting ledge, reversed, and plunged head downward into the water far below.

It was a pretty dive. And it was executed not only with the skill of a trained swimmer, but with a suddenness that left the captain gaping, open-mouthed, with dumb amaze.

CHAPTER II. A leap in the dark

NOW, the distance from a liner's second deck to the water below does not look very great. A diver will speedily find it far longer than it appears.

Also, a man who, under ordinary circumstances, can readily swim a mile or more in moderately cool salt water, will find it quite another thing to swim twenty strokes in a February sea that is thick with floating ice fragments. The more so, if he be weighted by shoes and clothing.

As Clyde Maxwell, expert swimmer, struck water, the chill of it bit his very bone. He sank like, a plummet, the cold numbing his every faculty. Dimly he realized he must swim as never before, if he would counteract this.

He was coming to the surface. With arms and legs he struck out madly.

At first his numbed limbs almost refused to obey him. His heart seemed hammering in his throat, choking him.

As he came up, he was aware of the liner's side, rising, miles upon miles, like a top less precipice, above his head. To the right, far away, through the gathering twilight, glowed the lights of Rosebank and of the Quarantine Station. In that direction he began to swim.

His clothes held him back. Once his head came in contact with a bit of floating ice, with a force that almost stunned him. He could hear, as though from a vast distance, the captain's booming voice, howling orders.

Clyde Maxwell knew that a boat would be lowered at once and sent in search of him. He knew, too, that no swimmer can hope to keep headway against a rowboat. But the night was fast settling down. By that dim light, and amid so many fragments of flotsam and dirty ice, he might possibly hope to avoid observation.

Shore was less than a quarter mile away. If he could gain its shelter unseen, he might readily get to New York within an hour or so. It was worth the chance.

Ordinarily, Clyde would have thought little enough of such a swim, even fully dressed as he was. But now, every stroke was anguish.

Yet it comforted him to note that as he continued swimming, the first numbness began to wear off; to be succeeded, in fact, by a certain glow of physical reaction. He was young, barely twenty-five, and in fine physical condition. Where many a man would have sunk, through shock and exhaustion, he battled on.

He swam for what seemed hours. The yellow shore lights through the gray murk appeared to draw little nearer. The tide was almost at ebb. So he must swim upstream at an angle of forty-five degrees, to make any straight course.

A strong man, a young man, a trained swimmer, Clyde Maxwell found himself confronted with the hardest task of his life. It was an athletic contest where the prize was a safe landing; where loss meant a decidedly unpleasant form of death.

The numbness was all gone now. His body seemed to burn, as the blood stung to the surface in defiance to the surrounding cold. But his clothes weighed a ton, and his first burst of physical prowess was failing. He longed unspeakably for a minute's rest, that he might get second-wind and call upon his wearied muscles for a newer, stronger effort.

But he dared not float, lest some crosscurrent sweep him out to sea. Turning, he swam on his back, to shift the strain.

At the second stroke, some gigantic invisible hand apparently gripped his right leg in an agonizing clasp that doubled the limb tight under him.

“Cramp!” he muttered, to himself. “This won't do. It'll spread to the other leg or to my body; and then I'm a goner.”

His shoulder struck against some rough surface. Instinctively, he threw out his arm to seize or push away the obstruction. He had come alongside a great splinter of mast, some twelve feet in length and as thick as his own body.

At the same instant his other leg doubled under him with an excruciating wrench of pain. The swimmer threw an arm over the broken spar and hung there exhausted, helpless, trying to force his knotted leg-muscles to straighten out from their chill-induced cramp.

For the moment, he was safe. This bit of wreckage had been whirled hither and yon, for weeks perhaps in the thousand tides, currents and eddies of the sea. It might even be a vestige of some wreck on the Labrador or the Florida coast. It and himself—two atoms of hopeless jetsam—had been brought into accidental touch in his hour of dire need.

There he clung, panting, exhausted, in agony. And, with the cessation of his own motion, he could hear the steady slap-slap-slap of water against the prow of a fast-moving boat, and the steady chum of rowers' blades.

The boat was coming. The boat sent from the liner to find his body or to bring him back to legal captivity.

At the thought, his blood ran warm again and his slack jaw set firmly. He had risked life in that mad effort to reach shore, to reach the girl he loved, to save her from poverty.

Was he to be hauled forth ignominiously from the water, lugged back to the ship and be perhaps clapped into irons? A pretty wind-up, was it not, to so wildly daring a venture? The thought roused his cooling rage to fever point.

The boat was drawing very near. It was perhaps midway between the liner and the shore. Lying there alongside of his spar, Clyde could see the craft silhouetted against the paler eastern sky-line. Four men were rowing. In the bow, stood a petty officer, bending forward and scanning the waters. A white-capped coxswain was at the tiller.

“He can't have come much farther in this time,” the standing man was saying. “Either we're close to him, or else he's sunk. Most likely he's gone down. It's ten to one against any one keeping afloat in zero water like that.”

He spoke indifferently, as if commenting on some impersonal fact. Clyde Maxwell, barely fifty feet away, heard him and illogically resented the fellow's calm.

“Hold hard!” called the steersman suddenly, rising in his seat and pointing toward Maxwell. “There he is!”

“Where? Oh, over there? You idiot, that thing's twelve feet long. It's a broken spar.”

“I thought I saw it move. It—”

“Move? Every wave makes it bob up and down. Give way there!”—to the rowers—“Keep her a point more upstream, Saunders. He'd make for shore at the nearest point—not so far down as this.”

The boat swept by, not forty feet from the spar. Clyde clenched his teeth over his tongue to keep from crying for help as the rowers faded away into the gloom. But the picture of his own humiliation and the prospect of losing his one chance held him silent.

He was in no instant danger of drowning. He could hang onto this spar for hours before numbness would shake off his clutch from the slimy wood.

If he floated out toward sea, there was always a chance of some incoming craft hearing his hail and picking him up. And no rescuer need know he had come from a quarantined ship.

It was a chance and he resolved to take it. He shut his eyes and held on.

The chill was creeping all over him now, and his teeth were chattering. He was seized by a ridiculous desire to sleep. He tried once to climb atop the spar. But before his numbed muscles could accomplish the task, the fragment of mast rolled over.

He was knocked off under water. Only by a mighty effort could he catch a fresh hold on his treacherous support.

Thus, it seemed, centuries of time crawled by.

Suddenly, as the drowsiness was growing too powerful to be longer combated, something grated underneath the spar. The wood shook, floated a second longer, then came to a standstill with a slight shock.

Light as was the impact it served to loosen Clyde's stiffened hold. He sank—into three feet of water!

The feeling of hard, rough sand under his feet jerked the man back to life. He looked up. Above him, not twenty feet away rose the bank. The spar, caught in an eddy, had drifted ashore, a half mile or so south of Quarantine Station.

Clyde Maxwell was still too numb to stand. On all fours, groaning and panting, he scrambled weakly to land. There, forcing himself to kick to twist quickly about, he at last restored some semblance of life to his deadened body.

Staggering up the bank, more than once falling from sheer fatigue, the drenched, exhausted man found himself a mile or so away from a lighted village. Beyond the far houses he saw a train moving northward, toward the New York ferry.

The sight put new life into him. He reeled onward a few yards. But the longing for sleep had come back upon him with redoubled force. He lurched sideways and fell.

As he struck the frozen ground, some hard, bulky object in his hip pocket was pushed painfully against his thigh. Dully, he wondered what it was. Then he remembered.

His pocket flask!

With stiff, sensationless fingers he hauled the thing from his pocket, knocked off the neck against a stone (his fingers were far too numb to manage the cork) and set the flask to his lips.

A deep draft of the fierce, biting liquid. Then another. And warmth began to replace the deadly chill of his body.

He got to his feet. Every movement was pain. But he could move. And he no longer yearned for sleep.

He stumbled onward toward the town.

In the middle of a vacant lot stood a little one-story wooden building, rough-hewn, unpainted. It was apparently a tool-house. From between the gaping boards streaks of warm red light streamed out. A tin chimney poured forth smoke.

Maxwell climbed a low fence and crossed the field toward the tiny shack. The prospect of warmth was too strong for the chattering man to resist. In another minute he had groped his way through the dark, to the side of the building.

There he paused. How was he to account for his soaked clothes, his tremendous fatigue? Yet, so tempting was the mental vision of a warm room that he did not hesitate.

He was feeling his way around the shanty in search of the door, when a truly terrifying voice from within broke upon the silence of the winter night.

“Hist!” growled the voice, with an odd mixture of gruffness and natural soprano quality. “We must dissemble! Should the minions of the law track us to our lair in these mountain fastnesses, all would be lost. As we depart hence, let each man make his own way homeward. We must not be seen together, lest some shrewd sleuth suspect that the Dauntless Pirates of Staten Island are—”

“Say, Tim!” interrupted another treble voice, “ma says I can't be a Dauntless Pirate after next Saturday. She say's it's nonsense to—”

“Peace!” thundered the first speaker. “What have we here? Rank mutiny, varlet, I—”

“Tim,” put in a third pirate, “if old Masterson ever gets onto our using his tool shed for a pirate lair, he'll—”

“Cheese it!” suddenly whispered the chief of the Dauntless Pirates of Staten Island. “Someone's outside! I heard—”

“It's Masterson!” squealed another. “He'll—”

Terror smote the Dauntless ones. Blind, unreasoning terror. There was a scuffle. A rickety door, not three feet from where Maxwell stood, burst open. Half a dozen small boys dashed forth at top speed.

At a safe distance they turned and shrilled a wild defiance to their unseen grown-up foe. Then, evidently fearing pursuit, they vanished homeward. Maxwell lurched into the deserted “lair.”

The warmth and comfort of the place stretched forth and enveloped him. He entered, shut the creaking door behind him and looked about.

The room was about twelve feet by twelve in area. The walls were of unplaned shoring, the tarred flat roof low. The place was hot to suffocation. In one corner was a pile of farming implements. In the center of the apartment stood a cheap, air-tight stove, red hot. On the floor beneath it a heap of driftwood.

A table held two candles, and was further burdened by a feast of rough sandwiches, new roasted potatoes and similar viands. A skull and crossbones in charcoal covered half the door. Old coats and other farm-clothes hung from pegs on the wall. Such was the Dauntless Pirates' lair.

Clyde Maxwell paid scant heed at first to his surroundings.

Scarce had he spread his blue fingers in front of the stove when he began to divest himself of his clothing. Each wringing wet garment he hung up near the red-hot center of warmth. Then, with a cast-off jumper that he found lying among the tools, he set to work vigorously to rub himself down.

Soon, he was not only in a glow, but in perspiration as well. The menace of pneumonia was past. There had been nine chances in ten that such exposure as he had undergone would bring on congestion of the lungs.

The hut had providentially afforded the tenth chance. Warmed, in a glow, rested from his exertions, Maxwell all at once realized that he was hungry.

“I'm afraid,” he murmured, “I'll have to be an unbidden guest at the Dauntless Pirates' board.”

His meal over, and his clothing dry, he redressed, and prepared to go. He laughed softly to himself at the tame ending of his rash adventure.

He had sprung melodramatically from the rail of an ocean liner, had plunged into ice-laden waters, had battled like mad with grim death, had eluded pursuit and had saved his well-nigh extinct life. He had come ashore, found warmth, food and a place to dry his clothes.

All that remained was to walk a mile to the nearest station, board a train for the ferry, then take a boat to New York, and arrive at Sylvia Tennant's home almost in time for dinner.

The adventure promised to end tamely enough. Now that it was all over, he half-wished there had been one or two more details of excitement in it. It would make better telling.

He was fully dressed again, even to the tweed sea-cap which, jammed down to his ears, had somehow stayed on his head throughout the icy swim. Nothing about him would suggest to the casual eye a man who had illegally escaped from a quarantined ship.

It had been a big risk. He saw that, now. But it was over. And Sylvia and the six hundred and twenty thousand dollars were well worth the superhuman task he had accomplished.

Clyde stepped to the door and opened it. A blast of chill air made him shiver. To go as he was, from that hot room out into the windy February night would be suicidal.

He wished yearningly for the heavy ulster he had shed when he jumped overboard. Then his eye fell on the row of old clothes on the wall.

“I'll have to borrow something more,” he told himself. “I can send it back by express or bring it back myself when the honeymoon's over. And I'll slip the owner a dollar or two by way of rent.”

He was glancing over the motley assortment of garments, as he spoke. All were evidently such clothing as a man might keep in barn or shed to year while working in the fields.

From under a line of battered overalls, jumpers, jackets and torn sweaters, Clyde fished out at last an overcoat.

Its sleeves were frayed. It was shiny at elbow. Several buttons were gone. There was dried mud here and there on its worn plaid surface. But the coat was warm and big. Maxwell brushed away the mud, dusted the mangy plush collar and slipped into the garment.

Then, fastening it as best he could, he put on his cap again and set forth, turning his back upon the hospitable lair of the Dauntless Pirates.

Somehow, as he started briskly toward the railroad track, his buoyant spirit seemed to fail.

Now that all peril was apparently over, he felt an odd sense of impending trouble.

CHAPTER III. A new turn in the road

A CHURCH clock somewhere was striking eight, as Clyde Maxwell boarded the last car of a train bound for the New York ferry.

There were few passengers, and such as chanced to be in the same car seemed to find nothing unusual in the spectacle of a tall, gloveless young man in a shabby, ill-fitting plaid overcoat and a brown tweed sea-cap.

When he came to pay his fare, Clyde mechanically thrust his fingers into the change pocket of the overcoat. One coin was there; a nickel. It was only after he had handed this over that he realized he had unconsciously robbed the coat's real owner of the money.

“I'll make it good when I send back the coat,” he thought. “It was probably a nickel he stuck here to buy a cigar or a glass of beer next time he happened to be wearing that old coat to the village.”

Then the refugee's mind turned with a joyous rush to the welcome that lay before him. Each revolution of the train's wheels was carrying him nearer and nearer to the girl he adored. In another hour he would feel her dear arms about his neck, her lips pressed to his.

How she would thrill at the story of what he had dared and done in order to come to her and to save her fortune!

Surely no knight errant of old had hazarded more, in so brief a space, for his lady-love. Now that he was safe he knew he had run a fearful risk. But it was past. And it was worth it all.

But for his daring, he must even now have been back on that horrible ship, herded with the rest of the human sheep, awaiting the quarantine's end, for another two days.

If, according to the health officer, no new cases were reported by the morning of the third day, the passengers would be allowed to land.

The third day! This was the night of February 27. The morning of the third day would be the morning of March 2.

A whole day too late! A day whose loss would mean over half a million dollars. And the difference between wealth and grinding, toil-ridden semipoverty. If—

The train drew into the terminal. With a handful of other passengers, Clyde Maxwell rushed toward the ferry. He could see a boat in the slip.

A uniformed guard was motioning a group of people aboard. That meant the boat was about to start. He.would be just in time.

Maxwell thrust his fingers again, by custom, into the overcoat's change pocket, drew them out with a laugh at his own absent-mindedness, thrust his hand into his trousers pocket, and fished forth a fistful of small change.

Hastily glancing at the coins as he ran, he selected a quarter, slipped the rest back into his pocket, reached the ticket window; and, with one eye on the boat, pushed the piece of silver across to the ticket-seller.

“Hurry, please!” he said, as the seller hesitated, “I want to catch that boat.”

“Whatcher given me?” growled the ticket