It could have been on the third night, more likely it was the fourth, that he heard the sound.
He was lying on his back, arms folded over his breast, while he studied the starry sweep of Heaven. Now and then he would close his eyes, then open them again, groggily amazed that he was still alive. He hoped that it wouldn't rain, since rain might keep him breathing for hours longer, conceivably even for another day; and he didn't want that. He was ready to die now. He truly hoped that it would be tonight, and believed it would. He didn't want to see the sun rise again. He hated the sun.
The sound changed everything. He sat up. He wouldn't have supposed a minute before that he'd be able to sit up again. His heart beat fast.
It was a scrapy sound, underlaid by a tinkle of tiny pebbles being batted together, the whole suggesting that a heavy object was being dragged in a slow and furtive manner across the beach. It was steady: it did not stop and start.
He could not see what caused it, for the sound came from one of the few stretches of beach not visible from his headquarters here in the center of the island; but it was not far away.
The sea all around was completely clear, it was blank. But he could still hear that sound.
He crept toward it. He peered over the top of a small dune—just in time to see something low but very wide and ponderous plop into the water and disappear.
The Devil? It was his first thought, of course, but he quickly discarded it. Everybody knew that the Evil One had a fondness for appearance in the guise of something that retreats, thus luring his humanly inquisitive victim toward him. Nor did Adam think himself so pure that he was impervious to the Devil. What he had done with Elnathan Evans remained on his conscience, for instance, as did indeed, though to a lesser extent, since it was different here, what he had done with Maisie. He was not prepared, the way a man ought to be, to meet his Maker. But he was as much prepared as he could be, now.
No, it wasn't arrogance but just the opposite quality, that of humbleness, which caused Adam to dismiss the thought that the Devil might be pursuing him. That the Duchess' brat should be at heart veritably humble was a notion many a Newporter would have larded with scorn, for in Newport they esteemed him a cocky lad. Yet it was the truth that Adam Long did not think himself of sufficient importance to attract such a personage as the Prince of Darkness to an out-of-the-way place. He knew that in the eyes of God one immortal soul is equal to another, any other; and because he was a man he had a soul, howsoever battered it might be. He knew, too, that Satan or any of Satan's more reputable minions could travel astounding distances in almost no time at all, moved of course by magic. But even then he didn't believe that he was about to be tempted. The Devil had better things to do—or, to put it another way, worse things.
A boat? He had perhaps wildly hoped this, for a split-second. But a boat doesn't slip quietly out of sight into the sea.
A log seemed most likely; and if that's what it had been he ought to get down there and be ready to catch it when it was rolled up on shore again. But it did not come back. There was no break in the water except what the little waves made. A log would—
Suddenly it flashed upon Adam what he had seen.
A turtle!
They come big in those waters, some of them a quarter of a ton, and to anybody's taste they're a delicacy. Adam had eaten green turtle many times at Providence, where it and buccan, smoked beef, were favored food. He knew nothing about how they were caught or how butchered, but he did know that there was a great deal of meat in a turtle. There would be a great deal of blood, too.
The thought of that blood must have dizzied him even beyond his ordinary state of confusion, for he squatted there staring at the place where the turtle had disappeared for many minutes before he began to ask himself why it had come out of the sea in the first place. Well, he had heard that the female turtle goes ashore only to lay her eggs, which she buries in the sand. Eggs! Slavering, shaking like a man with a fever, he crept down to the beach. But though he crawled for hours, his face close to the sand, peering, squinting, sniffing like a dog that seeks a buried bone, he could find no trace of eggs or a nest.
The moon rose, but Adam didn't rely on his eyesight. He dug with his hands. Again and again he ran sand and stones through his fingers. He divided that whole section of the beach into imaginary squares, and riffled each, and patted it. He enlarged his field. Having been over it once, he went over it again. His fingers cut, his eyes watering, he sobbed —but he continued to search. The dreams were gone now. He scrabbled.
Even when the sun came back, he did not cease to work. He didn't even go to the center of the island for his hat, a carelessness that was his undoing. He never truly quit that task. He simply became aware, after a while, that he was no longer working and was in fact lying flat. His head was a turmoil of pain. If he'd had anything to be sick with, he would have been violently sick; as it was, his innards hurt like fire. All his muscles ached, all his bones and joints. He rolled over—it took mighty near all of his strength—and learned that the sun his enemy was low.
He wanted to give up. He wanted just to close his eyes and relax, drifting into death the way they say a man does when he freezes.
He didn't. Somehow he struggled to his knees again, and somehow went back and forth over the beach, setting it to rights, filling holes he had made, smoothing the surface, straightening the sand, tidying. There wasn't any nest. That turtle somehow had been scared away. It might come back tonight. Do turtles smell? They certainly see. This one, if it returned, must note no change.
Each movement an exquisite agony, Adam dragged himself to the leeward end of this beach, where he lay on his belly, placing sharp stones under his chin in an effort to keep himself from relaxing. He watched the beach. He watched— He didn't stir, but just lay there looking along that beach, striving to keep his eyes open. He did not think of anything save those eyes. He believed that his pain was too acute to let him sleep, and his one problem, as he saw it, was to face the beach and keep his eyes from closing.
Time can do curious things; and pain, too, is a trickster. Adam might have fallen asleep in the conventional sense, or he might have been brushed by a wave of unconsciousness, as he had been that morning when he suffered the sunstroke. When next he became aware of anything at all it was not of opening his eyes—as far as he could tell he had never closed them—but of the brightness of the beach. The moon was up, the breeze had fallen. And ten feet away, looking right at him, was the biggest turtle he had ever seen.
What he had thought the previous night when he'd glimpsed the monster slipping back into the sea might well have returned to him now, for there was much that was diabolical in the appearance of this turtle; but it didn't.
The head was low, about on a level with Adam's own, and flat on top though jowly beneath, made up of leathery triangles, and it was extraordinarily wide when you looked right at it, as Adam was doing: it must have been fully a foot across. Though the rest of the beast was the color of mud, the feet and even more the head were scaly, shimmering, iridescent. The tip of the snout was a black shiny pinpoint, very sharp. The mouth, all floppy with folds at the corners, was hooked back in a grin of unspeakable malice. Most compelling were the eyes, small but extremely bright, hard, feline, like the mouth unadulterated evil, in the moonlight glittering sometimes green but sometimes a bright light red.
The turtle did not move. Conceivably it was as astonished to see Adam as Adam was to see it.
Adam felt a tingling all along his body and down his legs. Would he be able to spring up? Would he be able even to get up?
The turtle moved one paw. Adam heaved himself to his feet. The whole world rocked like a tippy canoe and he put his arms out right and left to balance himself. The turtle turned, and started for the water. Adam somehow ran after it.