Even Unto Death

• Watchlist

The quaint old fishing village of Galilee Harbor stretched for a mile along the uneven shore line. At one side of the harbor Gallows Hill shut off the view of the sea, and at the other side on a green slope were the bungalows of the rich summer colony. To this favored spot came the Gordons, a brother and sister. Walter Gordon quickly showed that he had an overbearing disposition and a bad temper. A few days after his arrival he knocked down a meek little old man who had accidentally jostled him, and when others interfered they suffered the same fate. Then Jack Livingston, son of the village parson, happened along. Jack took in the situation of the big brute and the little old man. Whereupon he proceeded to do to Gordon what the latter had been doing to the other. The result was that he incurred Gordon's savage enmity. Dorothea Gordon had rowed out to the rocks in the harbor to sketch the seals that sported in the rough water. Her boat slipped its mooring and drifted away, and Dorothea was swept off the rock by the rapidly rising tide. Had Jack not been returning from the fishing grounds she would have perished. He took her home, and placed her in his mother's care. Walter, hearing of what had befallen his sister, hastened to the minister's house, and roughly took her away with him. After this, in disobedience to her brother's orders, Dorothea became a frequent visitor at the parsonage. One evening Gordon caught the lovers bidding each other a sweet good-night at the gate. Had Dorothea not interfered the two men would have come to blows. Jack decided to return and induce Dorothea to elope with him. Retracing his steps he saw her sitting on the balcony in the moonlight, and climbing up to her he pressed and won his suit. As he let himself down the village scandal monger saw him and told the girl's brother. In a towering rage Gordon started after Jack. Silently his enemy approached. With a loaded pistol in his hand the irate brother confronted his man. He fired. The bullet went wild. The two men grappled. Jack wrenched the weapon from his assailant's hand. Jack, with an iron grip on the other's throat, threw him violently to the floor, then waited for him to renew the struggle. But Gordon never moved. John, who had heard the sounds of the struggle, appeared on the scene and found Jack bending anxiously over a dead man. Late that night at sea, two men threw a long bundle wrapped in sail cloth from a rowboat. The next day the sea cast up its dead. The name of Jack's boat was painted upon the canvas in which the body was wrapped. He was arrested and indicted for murder. By the aid of his brother he escaped, sailed to an uninhabited island miles from the mainland, and begun the life of solitary exile. The searching party found his upturned boat drifting near the shore. It was supposed that he had been drowned, and further search was abandoned. A year passed. Dorothea, from grief over the loss of her sweetheart, was but a shadow of her former self. John Livingston, realizing that the hand of death was upon her, went to the island and told his brother Jack. Together they returned. That evening, as the sun was setting, Dorothea, weak and sick at soul, stole from her sick bed to the seashore, her heart crying out to the man whom fate had so wronged, and whom she believed was resting beneath the ocean's turbulent waters. Her fugitive lover found her there. With a cry of joy she sprang into his arms. Their lips met; it was the parting kiss. Her eyes, suddenly grown large and wild, stared strangely into her lover's face. With a long sigh she fell back lifeless into his arms. Jack did not hesitate. Behind him lay the mainland with its turmoil and heartaches; before him was the rolling sea. One offered life without hope, the other hope without life. Gathering his sweetheart into his arms he went out into the oblivion of the ocean's depths, just as the sun lost itself in a blaze of glory in the bosom of the Western Sea.