The Crossroads by L. Ron Hubbard

Author:L. Ron Hubbard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fantasy
ISBN: 9781592125326
Publisher: Galaxy Press, L.L.C.
Published: 2010-06-01T04:00:00+00:00

The Devil’s Rescue

The Devil’s Rescue

HE had been cold so long that he had even ceased to dream of the great logs crackling in the old manor fireplace of his home. He just shivered now and then and ached, becoming conscious of the fact that it was bitter for a moment and then relapsing into a blue ache which ate him from the mop of his salt-encrusted hair to his cracked feet.

He had stopped courting the madness of envisioning great dinners he had eaten, recalling rather the peculiarly delicious flavor of the last biscuit in the breadbox, which moldy and inedible had vanished to its last crumb some two days before.

At the end of sixty hours he had been exhausted with holding himself against the sick lurches, the violent pitches and whipping rolls of the nineteen-foot lifeboat but now he braced himself not at all but lay prone in five inches of water and limply shifted with it from side to side.

It was hell to open his eyes once the salt had formed over them while shut, but some deep instinct in him bade him, now and then, to look up at the tattered ensign which hung upside down on the mast. The savage energy of the wind tearing into the red and white and blue wool wearied him and again he shut his eyes.

It was almost sunset. Sunset of his twenty-second day in an open boat somewhere south and west of that ironically named place, the Cape of Good Hope.

First he had unloaded the cabin boy over the rail and into the grey restlessness of the sea. He had done it with great sorrow at the time, although it seemed to him now that the important thing about it was how strong he had been. What determination had shone out of him that he would not suffer a like fate! How bravely had he braced himself against that oar, bidding the crew bend their backs until the wind shifted and he could set the sail.

Then he had unloaded the cook. It had seemed strange that the fellow had not been able to live longer on his fat. And the wind hadn’t shifted and when dawn rose, the reason why he’d had to carry so much starboard helm the last hour became apparent and so they had dumped the bow oar into the sea.

That was all after the wind had started to blow straight off the Cape. There was nothing astern but auks, he told them. Auks and ice, and they had nothing to lose but their lives which weren’t worth much anyway. And so they’d dumped the bow oar’s dead heaviness into the sea, whipped into a creamy froth now by the rising wind.

About then he had ceased keeping track of the rest of his crew. The captain, had he not been dead on the schooner’s house and in a hundred fathom by now, would have kept a very punctual log about it, doubtless. But not his mate.

And then a

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