Peace rode with him. His body rested, and
the tension left his nerves which for months had been strung like the
gut on a violin.
Between Welcome Pass and Cape Coburn the southeaster loosed its full
fury on him. The seas rose steeper at the turn of the tide, broke with a
wicked curl. He put the Cape on his lee after a wild fifteen minutes
among dangerous tiderips, and then prudence drove him to shelter.
He put into a bottle-necked cove gained by a passage scarce twenty feet
wide which opened to a quiet lagoon where no wind could come and where
the swell was broken into a foamy jumble at the narrow entrance.
He cooked his supper, ate, watched the sun drop behind the encircling
rim of firs. Then he lay on a cushion in the cockpit until dark came and
the green shore of the little bay grew dim and then black and the dusky
water under the yawl's counter was split with the phosphorescent flashes
of darting fish.
Across a peninsula, on the weather side of the Cape, he could hear the
seas thud and the surf growl like the distant booming of heavy
batteries. Over his head the wind whistled and whined in the firs with a
whistle and a whine like machine-gun bullets that have missed their
mark.
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