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straight to the guard-house and tried to open the door, but it was locked; then he went to the side and looked in. There was just sufficient light to see that the place was empty. So he went along the cliff looking for Willy. It was now light enough to see all round, for the blackness of the sky overhead had passed, the heavy clouds being swept away by the driving wind; but nowhere could he see any trace of the man he sought. He went all along the cliff up the Watter's Mou', till, following the downward trend of the rock, and splashing a way through the marsh - now like a quagmire, so saturated was it with the heavy rainfall - he came to the shallows opposite the Barley Mill. Here he met a man from The Bullers, who had come along by the Castle, and him he asked if he had seen Willy Barrow on his way. The decidedly negative answer "A've seen nane. It's nae a night for ony to be oot than can bide wi'in!" made him think that all might not be well with Sailor Willy, and so he went back again on his search, peering into every hole and cranny as he went. At the flagstaff he met some of his companions, who, since the storm had passed, had come to look for weather signs and to see what the sudden tempest might have brought about. When they heard that there was no sign of the coastguard they separated, searching for him, and shouting lest he might have fallen anywhere and hear their voices.
All that night they searched, for each minute made it more apparent that all was not well with him; but they found no sign. The waves still beat into the Watter's Mou' with violence, for though the storm had passed the sea was a wide-stretching mass of angry waters, and curling white crowned every wave. But with the outgoing tide the rocky bed of the cove broke up the waves, and they roared sullenly as they washed up the estuary.
In the grey of the morning a fisher-boy rushed up to a knot of men who were clustered round the guard-house and called to them:
"There's somethin' wollopin' aboot i' the shallows be the Barley Mill! Come an' get it oot! It looks like some ane!" So there was a rush made to the place. When they got to the islands of sea-grass the ebbing tide had done its work, and stranded the "something" which had rolled amid the shallows.
There, on the very spot whence the boat had set sail on its warning errand, lay its wreckage, and tangled in it the body of the noble girl who had steered it - her brown hair floating wide and twined round the neck of Sailor Willy, who held her tight in his dead arms.
The requiem of the twain was the roar of the breaking waves and the screams of the white birds that circled round the Watter's Mou'.
End
The Mystery of the Sea
CHAPTER V The Mystery of the Sea
CHAPTER VI The Ministers of the Doom
CHAPTER VII From Other Ages and the Ends of the Earth
CHAPTER VIII A Run on the Beach
CHAPTER IX Confidences and Secret Writing
CHAPTER XIII A Ride Through the Mountains
CHAPTER XV A Peculiar Dinner-Party
CHAPTER XVIII Fireworks and Joan of Arc
CHAPTER XIX On Changing One’s Name
CHAPTER XXI The Old Far West and the New
CHAPTER XXV Inductive Ratiocination
CHAPTER XXVI A Whole Wedding Day
CHAPTER XXVII Entrance to the Cavern
CHAPTER XXVIII Voices in the Dark
CHAPTER XXX The Secret Passage
CHAPTER XXXI Marjory’s Adventure
CHAPTER XXXV The Pope’s Treasure
CHAPTER XXXVII Round the Clock
CHAPTER XXXVIII The Duty of a Wife