Piper held the door, waiting respectfully. The old man's sleeves were rolled to the arm-pit. On one hairy fore-arm a dancing-girl was tattooed, record of the days, now forty years since, before, in his own simple phrase, he had larned Christ. He knew no fear himself: for he knew that he was impregnable. But his heart went out to this slip of a lad, who had to face Eternity alone, and found it terrible. The twilight of love, always in all faces the same, which comes when at a call the Christ rises from the deeps of the heart, darkened his eyes. He gave a shy little cough. "There's one bower-anchor'll weather any storm, by your leave, sir," he said, the sailor and the Christian quaintly commingled. The boy felt the other's strength flow into his. "I know," he panted, and plunged. CHAPTER LXV THE DOINGS IN THE CREEK I As he ran he seemed to himself to be a body of lead borne on watery dream-legs. In the sally of yesterday at least he had Knapp with him. Now he was alone. And to dare alone is to be revealed to yourself, naked as you are. A visible danger would have strengthened him. It was the horror of he- knew-not-what coming from he-knew-not-where that made his heart hammer. The boy's body screamed to go back. His will thrust it forward. The shock and struggle of the two charged him as with electricity. A touch, he felt, and he might go off in a flash of lightning. As he held on, and nothing happened, mind began to ride body more masterfully. The flesh, beaten, gave and gave; till in despair, abandoning its backward pull, it threw forward into the work. What was death? was it what the parsons seemed to think--a foreign land, millions of miles away, with an old man in a temper waiting somewhere in the middle to be nasty to him? Heaven and earth, this world and the next! Were there indeed two? a great gulf between them. Or were both one and everlasting? Was he, believing himself in Time, dwelling in Eternity now? Was he immortal now? His heart answered, _Now or never_. What then to fear? The thought whirled him forward. The grass felt goodly beneath his feet. The sun, still pale in mist, blessed him. A fresh wind flowed about him, flustering hair and shirt. His heart eased. After all his rear was fairly safe, and his flank unthreatened. As to his front--well, he had his eyes and his dirk. Gripping himself together, every hair alert, he ran. He was nearly across the sward now. Tall grass-blades pricked sparsely through the sand. The shingle-bank, roan against the sparkle of the sea, surged before him, and behind it--what? He was living in his eyes. The knoll lay now to his right rear. Behind it, across the creek, rose the Wish; and on the crest a Grenadier gazing seawards. Opposite the little hill, standing on the bank somewhere just above the entrance to the sluice, stood the Gentleman. II Kit dropped to his hands and knees.