The Sureness of MacKenzie

by Frederick R. Bechdolt

The Sureness of MacKenzie

By Frederick R. Bechdolt. Author of
"The Flight of the Lone Pass," "Under Sealed Orders," etc.

 

An epic of the hill wind and the fog. A story of thrills; and, when you think it 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 home-bound 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 south west 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.”

MacKenzie watched them from the locker for a good half hour; then went on deck, for the third man out has the task of cruising. He stood in the narrow cockpit, talking with the helmsman about the rising sea and the chances of the fog clearing away. But before he left for the cabin—“Keep her pretty well out toward the lightship,” he said quietly. “That Standard tanker's due to-night, and that French bark at almost any time.”

 

In the dark hour before the dawn, the helmsman sighted the huge oil carrier—a blurred pin point of light emerging through the night mists, miles away—and he kindled the torch to signal her. As he waved the flaring beacon to and fro, its buzzing awakened the three sleepers in the cabin, and they saw the crimson glare spilling down the companionway.

“Good ship for you, cap'n!” The sailor's hoarse announcement was followed by the tramp of his feet on the deck as he hurried forward to awaken his companions.

MacKenzie came up to take the wheel, and while he signaled for the engines he could hear old Wills stamping about the cabin to assemble his store clothes. Shortly before the launching of the yawl. Wills appeared, all evidences of that piratical undershirt extinguished beneath starched linen and black broadcloth. He hurried to the main rigging as the boat left the skids, and he hung there by the manropes, awaiting a safe moment when he could lower his two hundred and sixty-odd pounds into the pitching craft without bringing disaster.

“Good luck!” MacKenzie called from the cockpit. “Tell them if there's nothing better sailing they'd better send some one out here on the tender, for I'll be in on the Empress.”

Wills disappeared; and some moments later his voice floated upward from the darkened waters: “You always got to be so blame sure, Dan!”

MacKenzie's face remained impassive as that final rebuke reached him; and hours later, when he had hastened up into the wan dawn, responding to the helmsman's summons, his features wore no sign of triumph as he handed the glasses to Lea, pointing into the southwest. Through the fog the lenses picked up a gleaming, white bulk, like the specter of a remote tower which has been razed near its summit; and as that ghostly form stole on, looming larger through the damp mists, the binoculars discovered the black speck that crawled on before it.

“Tops'ls gone,” MacKenzie announced indifferently. “And there's the tug. Your Frenchman, Jack.”

“I guess you're right.” Lea shook his head as he hurried below to change his clothes.

“O' course I'm right,” MacKenzie told him placidly; “I knew that all along.”

 

Noon passed. The fog, which had been lifting for several hours, crawled up the great, tawny ridges where Tamalpais rises from the sea until it found upon the mountain's flanks the ancient rendezvous where it had often met the hill wind. Here it bided the approaching hour when they would meet again, to descend hand in hand to the inner portal of the Golden Gate and bring to pass the thing for which they had been preparing.

When the Empress thrust her steep, black prow over the earth's bulge, the circle had widened about the pilot boat until its drab circumference inclosed the headlands to the northeast and racing crests far beyond the silent, red-hulled lightship. The bar's entire shape was projected upon the waters in a vivid horseshoe-shaped smear of white, to which the towering billows raced, whispering. As they reached it, blanching in the instant, they leaped, roaring, amid a myriad snarling predecessors. From the lurching deck MacKenzie sniffed the keen, primeval tang of seaweed uptorn from the depths; and he gazed seaward, at the liner's smoke, a filament of brown, infinitesimal on the somber heavens.

“Raise the jack!” he ordered.

A sailor pulled the star-flecked banner to the masthead; and over the horizon, across the wild reaches of the ocean, the homing steamship and the little schooner spoke their greetings, flag for flag.

When they had drawn within a quarter of a mile of each other, the yawl slid from the skids into the hissing waters; the sailors sprang like cats between the thwarts; MacKenzie chose the next propitious instant, and followed them. They coasted from the summits of the gray-green billows into swirling troughs, shut off from all the world by rushing, foam-patched hills; they gained the lee of the biding liner. Her black side arose above them like the wall of a high building.

From the summit of that wall the slender Jacob's ladder dangled, now touching the edge of a rising wave, now receding skyward as the steamship rolled, showing her red belly.

There came a moment when the Empress settled toward the yawl, and the little boat rose as if to meet her. The sailors grunted at the oars; the yawl rushed broadside toward the lowering bulk. MacKenzie leaned forward in the stern sheets.

The moment crystallized into a fleeting instant. The yawl was rising, the ship still descending; the end of the Jacob's ladder hung within a few feet. Immediately that entire movement changed, and the ladder was swept away from the retreating boat.

But in the passing of that instant, as one who casts behind him all else upon the seizing of swift-racing opportunity, MacKenzie rose and leaped. Out of the boat against the reeling steel wall he sprang; he gripped the ladder's sides with both strong hands and found the step which lay unseen beneath him. Already the oarsmen were pulling off to safety; through the black plates he heard the clanging of the gong down in the engine room. He climbed up and gained the deck.

Awaiting him, the skipper stood upon the bridge, tall in his spotless uniform of navy blue, grizzled, austere on this far height with all his ship beneath him. The days and nights of lonely mastery, when every movement of that enormous structure, every revolution throughout its complicated mechanism, and every act among those hundreds on board were his to answer for; those days and nights were over now. In these two remaining hours, when he faced the climax of that struggle against the elements into which every voyage resolves itself, the law had given him a companion. As he had looked upon the land whose imminence is the final ordeal for every deep-water captain, he had seen approaching him the only man who had a right to share his responsibility without taking his orders. And now, as MacKenzie gained the bridge and these two exchanged greetings, each called the other by his title, captain.

MacKenzie looked into the northeast, appraising the hostile elements—the raging breakers on the bar, the swirling currents hidden in North Channel, the headlands ravenous for wreckage, the gray fog that clung to the slopes above them. Striving to read from their aspect the signs of any conspiracy against this ship, whose safety was his trust now, he studied the fog longer than all the others; he watched for any movement which might betray the connivance of the treacherous hill wind. But the fog remained motionless on the heights.

He spoke; the great liner turned under his feet. From the red-hulled lightship she departed northward and a little to the east, and she left the distant harbor entrance to the right of her foaming wake. For seven miles she traveled, skirting the outside of the roaring bar, until she had passed the curve where the horseshoe hooks inward parallel to the land. Here she reached an unmarked spot on the tumbling waters which MacKenzie knew as well as a landsman knows his own doorstep. Again he spoke; the huge bulk swerved as obediently as a living creature, found the new course, and plunged down North Channel with the Potato Patch roaring on her right, and on her left the surf under the ringing cliffs. Between these bounds, which narrowed as the ship went on, he guided her, while the great, green seas hammered her forward deck and hidden currents strove desperately against her keel, now fighting to drive her on the rocks and now to drag her upon the shoal. Four miles, and then she shook the last hampering deluge from her bows as she emerged between Bonita's teeth and the last bar buoy.

At the outer entrance of the Golden Gate she lingered for a moment, as one who hesitates before plunging into a final peril.

From the lofty bridge MacKenzie peered up the funnel-shaped lane whose narrow end opens between steep cliffs into the harbor. He looked into the bay and searched the hillsides above the Marin County precipices for any sign of downward movement in the fog. This was the last chance to stop until she passed through the neck of the funnel—between Fort Point and Lime Point. The gray fog was still motionless up there on the slopes. He uttered an order; the Empress started on.

She passed Mile Rock far over to her right. More than two miles ahead of her, at the edge of the point which has been named for it, the grim old black fort, with its rows of loopholes, stood out clearly. Across the narrow channel from it, the Lime Point Light house gleamed white upon its rocky headland.

Under MacKenzie's feet the decks were astir with men and women. Some were rushing to and fro in a fervor of final packing; others stood at the rail, gazing eagerly at the first evidences of the city; all were radiant with the expectancy of their home-coming. Back and forth among them stewards hurried on a multitude of errands; Chinese deck boys slipped unostentatiously in and out through the crowd; the noise of many tongues arose on all sides. Up here, remote from all that bustle, in the lonely place of responsibility, MacKenzie stood motionless; the captain paced back and forth close by, but spoke no word to him.

Then the fog seemed to fall from the hillsides upon the ship, it came so suddenly.

A thick, damp grayness cut off the bridge from everything; it obscured the decks; the bows were only a faint blur. The land vanished. The Empress was traveling on a little circle of dark waters over whose surface hoary shreds of mist were trailing; a circle whose circumference moved as the ship moved, whose area remained unchanged, without the slightest sound of anything beyond.

Out of that gray mystery great voices came, deep-toned, reverberating as in horror of the tidings which they proclaimed. The sirens were bellowing their brazen warnings to the ship, and the living rock trembled as they called their stern commands to keep away or die.

The ship went on; she must pass through the narrows before she could stop again. She was no longer steaming proudly in; she crept as one who has been stricken blind and feels her way; out of mid-channel toward the Marin County shore—MacKenzie was able to bring her that far while the fog was descending—and now she crawled along under the lofty hills. The passengers had left her decks; there were no signs of life save for the lookout hidden in the murk that cloaked the bows, and the two men on the bridge. The captain's face had grown tense, and as he paced back and forth he glanced often at MacKenzie. But MacKenzie stood motionless, and there was no sign of feeling on his face.

He was looking down upon that little circle of dark waters over which the hoary filaments of mist were drifting. He was reading its secrets—the movement of the tide, the direction of the swirling currents, the strength with which they were pushing upon the liner's submerged keel.

He was listening to the sounds in the gray fog—the whistle of the Empress, appealing hoarsely for guidance; the echoes with which the steep Marin County hills answered that appeal; the crashing blare of the Fort Point diaphone over to the right. These things and a strange sixth sense of locality which had come through long experience gave MacKenzie a picture.

In his mind's eye he saw beyond the limits of that little circle on the dark waters. He saw the ship and her surroundings as he would on a clear day.

That mental vision portrayed the liner, now entering the neck of the funnel-shaped lane, approaching close to the inner portal of the Golden Gate. Close beside her it showed the Marin County hills, rising straight from the water; before her bows, barring the way with its rock walls. Lime Point; across the narrow channel from this—ahead and to his right—Fort Point.

That was the picture. The echoes came down from the hills; the Lime Point siren roared straight ahead of him; and over there to the right the Fort Point diaphone was bellowing like a hundred fear-maddened bulls. The ship crept on.

In his mind's eye MacKenzie saw the steep, black prow approaching Lime Point—until, within a minute, he must say the word which would compel the Empress to turn to the right in order to avoid the rocky promotory as she passed through the narrows.

Then a strange and terrible change came.

The echoes from the steep bills dwindled and died away. The roaring of the Lime Point siren grew fainter, more remote, as if the ships were being shoved on to the right. The crashing diapason from Fort Point was growing with appalling suddenness.

At this same moment the color of the waters which swirled against the steel flanks of the Empress deepened to a turgid brown. The ebb tide was rushing seaward.

The captain halted abruptly. His tall form was erect no longer; he leaned forward, and his face was pallid as he peered into the fog toward the spot from which that diaphone's blare emerged.

In the instant, MacKenzie became rigid. He stood like a grim statue. His shaggy brows seemed to hide the eyes beneath than. Under his heavy, gray mustache his lips pressed tightly together. And he asked himself a question:

Had he erred?

If be had—if in the painting of that mental picture he had been mistaken—by a quarter of a mile in distance, by two minutes in time—this seven-knot ebb tide would he carrying the liner far over to her right. She would be steaming toward Fort Point. It had occurred once. Another ship, laden, like this one, with hundreds of men and women, had been swung off her course in a fog by the ebb tide, lusty with freshet waters, and driven on those rocks. The bones of that ship lay somewhere on the bottom mingled with the skeletons of her passengers.

Two minutes! And that narrow interval of time depended to a hair upon the superiority of the Empress' throbbing propellers over the opposition of the waters. What man could measure the results of that struggle down there under the surface? Or tell to exactness what might the currents were putting forth to-day?

The hillsides gave no echo now. The Lime Point siren died away entirely. The Fort Point diaphone crashed louder. The minute at whose expiration MacKenzie had intended to speak the word by which the liner would turn reached its final second. He put that question by. He had made his calculation in the beginning.

Now he spoke. The ship turned.

Her bow swung toward Fort Point; she steamed straight into that blaring warning as if she were defying it.

Her captain sprang toward MacKenzie; his right hand was raised in a gesture of terrible protest; he was sweating; great beads of water stood out on his forehead. “Man!” he shouted hoarsely. “The current! Can't you see?” He pointed frantically into the din of the diaphone as though it were a viable thing. “Can't you hear? You're piling her up on Fort Point!”

MacKenzie stood rigid. His head was thrust forward as if he were straining to listen for some other sound than that reverberating thunder which was overwhelming the entire ship; as if in this moment he were hoping to catch some shred of noise from the Lime Point siren in the place where he had pictured it. But there was no answer from that quarter.

The Empress kept on turning. Over her bows now, nearer, louder, terrible in volume and intensity, Fort Point's warning came. The captain leaped in front of MacKenzie. His hand flew out toward the marine telegraph.

“Stop her!” His voice was heavy with horror.

MacKenzie seized the captain's arm, and his fingers were like iron as he pulled it back from the handle of the telegraph. There was a sharp struggle; the captain tore away from him and whirled toward the man at the wheel. His lips parted; but even as he uttered the first word of that order to alter her course, MacKenzie drowned that order with his own deep-voiced command:

“Keep her headed as she is now!”

Then, as the ship moved on into the grayness, while the blare from Fort Point welled straight above her lofty prow, the captain groaned and clutched the rail instinctively, as though to save himself against the impact of the collision with those rocks.

In that final instant the fog, like a faint-hearted conspirator who gives up and flees before his companions, began to retreat up the slope toward the distant mountain. But the hill wind remained stubborn. So, as MacKenzie touched the captain on the shoulder, pointing over there straight to their left, they gazed upon the ragged rocks from which her pilot had preserved the ship, and they saw the pallid jets of steam emanating from the siren behind the white lighthouse; but as yet they could hear nothing of the warning which the siren bellowed.

On her beam now; and now it receded to her quarter; and now the Empress had passed the place into the channel. The harbor showed clear before her bows; the sunlight was flecking the waters. MacKenzie moved his hand upon the lever of the telegraph, and the great liner ceased that creeping to resume her proud pace toward the wharves.

 

“It was that wind in the hills,” MacKenzie told the secretary in the office of the Bar Pilots' Association, while he was leaving the order for fees which the captain had signed. “Come on thick for a few minutes, John; and just as I got her under Lime Point that wind played a dirty trick on me. Lime Point siren kept carrying off toward the mountain somewheres, and Fort Point came on so loud you couldn't hear another thing. For a minute they had me pretty near to guessing. I'd of been in trouble—if I hadn't been sure o' my bearings.”

Which was all the comment that he made, for he was in a hurry to get home for that birthday festival.

At home, he rested as a good workman should rest. He shook off that sea harshness of his; his voice was gentle as he played with his grandchildren. He dispensed with that quarter-deck authoritativeness; he became the slave of the whole shrieking brood and did their smallest bidding. As if it were wearisome now, he forsook that calmness which he had worn while he was dealing with the hostile elements; he fairly trembled with nervousness when he stole into the sitting room to place the two dolls on the, center table, so fearful was he lest one of the twins would catch him at it.

But there was a thing which he could not shake off, a trait which had fastened itself too firmly during his hours of facing the unexpected. One of his daughters mentioned it to her mother at the close of the evening, after the children had been put to bed, and while the rest of them were talking in front of the fire. MacKenzie was arguing with his two sons-in-law.

“Don't you go quoting government statistics at me,” he was saying implacably; “I don't care what they say; I'm right!”

His daughter's voice was full of amused tolerance as she spoke to her mother: “He is so sure!”

And if the elements were—as men of old believed them—gifted with the power of speech, there is no doubt that on their next meeting at the inner portal of the Golden Gate the hill wind and the fog would have echoed that sentiment.