Читать книгу: «The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 52, February, 1862», страница 12
"Let it melt out and float away in the spring," Mary said. "It may be a perch for a sea-gull or a buoy for a drowning man."
Here, if this were a long story instead of a short one, might be given a description of Peter Skerrett's house and the menu of Mrs. Skerrett's dinner. Peter and his wife had both been to great pillory dinners, ad nauseam, and learnt what to avoid. How not to be bored is the object of all civilization, and the Skerretts had discovered the methods. I must dismiss the dinner and the evening, stamped with the general epithet, Perfection.
"You will join us again to-morrow on the river," said Mrs. Skerrett, as Wade rose to go.
"To-morrow I go to town to report to my Directors."
"Then next day."
"Next day, with pleasure."
Wade departed and marked this halcyon day with white chalk, as the whitest, brightest, sweetest of his life.
CHAPTER X
FOREBODINGS
Jubilation! Jubilation now, instead of Consternation, in the office of Mr. Benjamin Brummage in Wall Street.
President Brummage had convoked his Directors to hear the First Semi-Annual Report of the new Superintendent and Dictator of Dunderbunk.
And there they sat around the green table, no longer forlorn and dreading a, failure, but all chuckling with satisfaction over their prosperity.
They were a happy and hilarious family now,—so hilarious that the President was obliged to be always rapping to Order with his paper-knife.
Every one of these gentlemen was proud of himself as a Director of so successful a Company. The Dunderbunk advertisement might now consider itself as permanent in the newspapers, and the Treasurer had very unnecessarily inserted the notice of a dividend, which everybody knew of already.
When Mr. Churm was not by, they all claimed the honor of having discovered Wade, or at least of having been the first to appreciate him.
They all invited him to dinner,—the others at their houses, Sam Gwelp at his club.
They had not yet begun to wax fat and kick. They still remembered the panic of last summer. They passed a unanimous vote of the most complimentary confidence in Wade, approved of his system, forced upon him an increase of salary, and began to talk of "launching out" and doubling their capital. In short, they behaved as Directors do when all is serene.
Churm and Wade had a hearty laugh over the absurdities of the Board and all their vague propositions.
"Dunderbunk," said Churm, "was a company started on a sentimental basis, as many others are."
"Mr. Brummage fell in love with pig-iron?"
"Precisely. He had been a dry-goods jobber, risen from a retailer somewhere in the country. He felt a certain lack of dignity in his work. He wanted to deal in something more masculine than lace and ribbons. He read a sentimental article on Iron in the 'Journal of Commerce': how Iron held the world together; how it was nerve and sinew; how it was ductile and malleable and other things that sounded big; how without Iron civilization would stop, and New Zealanders hunt rats among the ruins of London; how anybody who would make two tons of Iron grow where one grew before was a benefactor to the human race greater than Alexander, Caesar, or Napoleon; and so on,—you know the eloquent style. Brummage's soul was fired. He determined to be greater than the three heroes named. He was oozing with unoccupied capital. He went about among the other rich jobbers, with the newspaper article in his hand, and fired their souls. They determined to be great Iron-Kings,—magnificent thought! They wanted to read in the newspapers, 'If all the iron rails made at the Dunderbunk Works in the last six months were put together in a straight line, they would reach twice round our terraqueous globe and seventy-three miles two rails over.' So on that poetic foundation they started the concern."
Wade laughed. "But how did you happen to be with them?"
"Oh! my friend Damer sold them the land for the shop and took stock in payment. I came into the Board as his executor. Did I never tell you so before?"
"No."
"Well, then, be informed that it was in Miss Damer's behalf that you knocked down Friend Tarbox, and so got your skates for saving her property. It's quite a romance already, Richard, my boy! and I suppose you feel immensely bored that you had to come down and meet us old chaps, instead of tumbling at her feet on the ice again to-day."
"A tumble in this wet day would be a cold bath to romance."
The Gulf Stream had sent up a warm spoil-sport rain that morning. It did not stop, but poured furiously the whole day.
From Cohoes to Spuyten Duyvil, on both sides of the river, all the skaters swore at the weather, as profane persons no doubt did when the windows of heaven were opened in Noah's time. The skateresses did not swear, but savagely said, "It is too bad,"—and so it was.
Wade, loaded with the blessings of his Directors, took the train next morning for Dunderbunk.
The weather was still mild and drizzly, but promised to clear. As the train rattled along by the river, Wade could see that the thin ice was breaking up everywhere. In mid-stream a procession of blocks was steadily drifting along. Unless Zero came sliding down again pretty soon from Boreal regions, the sheets that filled the coves and clung to the shores would also sail away southward, and the whole Hudson be left clear as in midsummer.
At Yonkers a down train ranged by the side of Wade's train, and, looking out, he saw Mr. and Mrs. Skerrett alighting.
He jumped down, rather surprised, to speak to them.
"We have just been telegraphed here," said Peter, gravely. "The son of a widow, a friend of ours, was drowned this morning in the soft ice of the river. He was a pet of mine, poor fellow! and the mother depends upon me for advice. We have come down to say a kind word. Why won't you report us to the ladies at my house, and say we shall not be at home until the evening train? They do not know the cause of our journey, except that it is a sad one."
"Perhaps Mr. Wade will carve their turkey for them at dinner, Peter," Fanny suggested.
"Do, Wade! and keep their spirits up. Dinner's at six."
Here the engine whistled. Wade promised to "shine substitute" at his friend's board, and took his place again. The train galloped away.
Peter and his wife exchanged a bright look over the fortunate incident of this meeting, and went on their kind way to carry sympathy and such consolation as might be to the widow.
The train galloped northward. Until now, the beat of its wheels, like the click of an enormous metronome, had kept time to jubilant measures singing in Wade's brain. He was hurrying back, exhilarated with success, to the presence of a woman whose smile was finer exhilaration than any number of votes of confidence, passed unanimously by any number of conclaves of overjoyed Directors, and signed by Brummage after Brummage, with the signature of a capitalist in a flurry of delight at a ten per cent dividend.
But into this joyous mood of Wade's the thought of death suddenly intruded. He could not keep a picture of death and drowning out of his mind. As the train sprang along and opened gloomy breadth after breadth of the leaden river, clogged with slow-drifting files of ice-blocks, he found himself staring across the dreary waste and forever fancying some one sinking there, helpless and alone.
He seemed to see a brave, bright-eyed, ruddy boy, venturing out carelessly along the edges of the weakened ice. Suddenly the ice gives way, the little figure sinks, rises, clutches desperately at a fragment, struggles a moment, is borne along in the relentless flow of the chilly water, stares in vain shoreward, and so sinks again with a look of agony, and is gone.
But whenever this inevitable picture grew before Wade's eyes, as the drowning figure of his fancy vanished, it suddenly changed features, and presented the face of Mary Damer, perishing beyond succor.
Of course he knew that this was but a morbid vision. Yet that it came at all, and that it so agonized him, proved the force of his new feeling.
He had not analyzed it before. This thought of death became its touchstone.
Men like Wade, strong, healthy, earnest, concentrated, straightforward, isolated, judge men and women as friends or foes at once and once for all. He had recognized in Mary Damer from the first a heart as true, whole, noble, and healthy as his own. A fine instinct had told him that she was waiting for her hero, as he was for his heroine.
So he suddenly loved her. And yet not suddenly; for all his life, and all his lesser forgotten or discarded passions, had been training him for this master one.
He suddenly and strongly loved her; and yet it had only been a beautiful bewilderment of uncomprehended delight, until this haunting vision of her fair face sinking amid the hungry ice beset him. Then he perceived what would be lost to him, if she were lost.
The thought of Death placed itself between him and Love. If the love had been merely a pretty remembrance of a charming woman, he might have dismissed his fancied drowning scene with a little emotion of regret. Now, the fancy was an agony.
He had too much power over himself to entertain it long. But the grisly thought came uninvited, returned undesired, and no resolute Avaunt, even backed by that magic wand, a cigar, availed to banish it wholly.
The sky cleared cold at eleven o'clock. A sharp wind drew through the Highlands. As the train rattled round the curve below the tunnel through Skerrett's Point, Wade could see his skating course of Christmas-Day with the ladies. Firm ice, glazed smooth by the sudden chill after the rain, filled the Cove and stretched beyond the Point into the river.
It was treacherous stuff, beautiful to the eyes of a skater, but sure to be weak, and likely to break up any moment and join the deliberate headlong drift of the masses in mid-current.
Wade almost dreaded lest his vision should suddenly realize itself, and he should see his enthusiastic companion of the other day sailing gracefully along to certain death.
Nothing living, however, was in sight, except here and there a crow, skipping about in the floating ice.
The lover was greatly relieved. He could now forewarn the lady against the peril he had imagined. The train in a moment dropped him at Dunderbunk. He hurried to the Foundry and wrote a note to Mrs. Damer.
"Mr. Wade presents his compliments to Mrs. Damer, and has the honor to inform her that Mr. Skerrett has nominated him carver to the ladies to-day in their host's place.
"Mr. Wade hopes that Miss Damer will excuse him from his engagement to skate with her this afternoon. The ice is dangerous, and Miss Damer should on no account venture upon it."
Perry Purtett was the bearer of this billet. He swaggered into Peter Skerrett's hall, and dreadfully alarmed the fresh-imported Englishman who answered the bell, by ordering him in a severe tone,—
"Hurry up now, White Cravat, with that answer! I'm wanted down to the Works. Steam don't bile when I'm off; and the fly-wheel will never buzz another turn, unless I'm there to motion it to move on."
Mrs. Damer's gracious reply informed Wade "that she should be charmed to see him at dinner, etc., and would not fail to transmit his kind warning to Miss Damer, when she returned from her drive to make calls."
But when Miss Damer returned in the afternoon, her mother was taking a gentle nap over the violet, indigo, blue, green, yellow, orange, red stripes of a gorgeous Afghan she was knitting. The daughter heard nothing of the billet. The house was lonely without Fanny Skerrett. Mr. Wade did not come at the appointed hour. Mary was not—willing to say to herself how much she regretted his absence.
Had he forgotten the appointment?
No,—that was a thought not to be tolerated.
"A gentleman does not forget," she thought. And she had a thorough confidence, besides, that this gentleman was very willing to remember.
She read a little, fitfully, sang fitfully, moved about the house uneasily; and at last, when it grew late, and she was bored and Wade did not arrive, she pronounced to herself that he had been detained in town.
This point settled, she took her skates, put on her pretty Amazonian hat with its alert feather, and went down to waste her beauty and grace on the ice, unattended and alone.
CHAPTER XI
CAP'S AMBUSTER'S SKIFF
It was a busy afternoon at the Dunderbunk Foundry.
The Superintendent had come back with his pocket full of orders. Everybody, from the Czar of Russia to the President of the Guano Republic, was in the market for machinery. Crisis was gone by. Prosperity was come. The world was all ready to move, and only waited for a fresh supply of wheels, cranks, side-levers, walking-beams, and other such muscular creatures of iron, to push and tug and swing and revolve and set Progress a-going.
Dunderbunk was to have its full share in supplying the demand. It was well understood by this time that the iron Wade made was as stanch as the man who made it. Dunderbunk, therefore, Head and Hands, must despatch.
So it was a busy afternoon at the industrious Foundry. The men bestirred themselves. The furnaces rumbled. The engine thumped. The drums in the finishing-shop hummed merrily their lively song of labor. The four trip-hammers—two bull-headed, two calf-headed—champed, like carnivorous maws, upon red bars of iron, and over their banquet they roared the big-toned music of the trip-hammer chorus,—
"Now, then! hit hard!
Strike while Iron's hot. Life's short. Art's long."
By this massive refrain, ringing in at intervals above the ceaseless buzz, murmur, and clang throughout the buildings, every man's work was mightily nerved and inspired. Everybody liked to hear the sturdy song of these grim vocalists; and whenever they struck in, each solo or duo or quatuor of men, playing Anvil Chorus, quickened time, and all the action and rumor of the busy opera went on more cheerily and lustily. So work kept astir like play.
An hour before sunset, Bill Tarbox stepped into Wade's office. Even oily and begrimed, Bill could be recognized as a favored lover. He looked more a man than ever before.
"I forgot to mention," says the foreman, "that Cap'n Ambuster was in, this morning, to see you. He says, that, if the river's clear enough for him to get away from our dock, he'll go down to the City to-morrow, and offers to take freight cheap. We might put that new walking-beam, we've just rough-finished for the 'Union,' aboard of him."
"Yes,—if he is sure to go to-morrow. It will not do to delay. The owners complained to me yesterday that the 'Union' was in a bad way for want of its new machinery. Tell your brother-in-law to come here, Bill."
Tarbox looked sheepishly pleased, and summoned Perry Purtett.
"Run down, Perry," said Wade, "to the 'Ambuster,' and ask Captain Isaac to step up here a moment. Tell him I have some freight to send by him."
Perry moved through the Foundry with his usual jaunty step, left his dignity at the door, and ran off to the dock.
The weather had grown fitful. Heavy clouds whirled over, trailing snow-flurries. Rarely the sun found a cleft in the black canopy to shoot a ray through and remind the world that he was still in his place and ready to shine when he was wanted.
Master Perry had a furlong to go before he reached the dock. He crossed the stream, kept unfrozen by the warm influences of the Foundry. He ran through a little dell hedged on each side by dull green cedars. It was severely cold now, and our young friend condescended to prance and jump over the ice-skimmed puddles to keep his blood in motion.
The little rusty, pudgy steamboat lay at the down-stream side of the Foundry wharf. Her name was so long and her paddle-box so short, that the painter, beginning with ambitious large letters, had been compelled to abbreviate the last syllable. Her title read thus:—
I. AMBUSTER
Certainly a formidable inscription for a steamboat!
When she hove in sight, Perry halted, resumed his stately demeanor, and em-barked as if he were a Doge entering a Bucentaur to wed a Sea.
There was nobody on deck to witness the arrival and salute the magnifico.
Perry looked in at the Cap'n's office. He beheld a three-legged stool, a hacked desk, an inky steel-pen, an inkless inkstand; but no Cap'n Ambuster.
Perry inspected the Cap'n's state-room. There was a cracked looking-glass, into which he looked; a hair-brush suspended by the glass, which he used; a lair of blankets in a berth, which he had no present use for; and a smell of musty boots, which nobody with a nose could help smelling. Still no Captain Ambuster, nor any of his crew.
Search in the unsavory kitchen revealed no cook, coiled up in a corner, suffering nightmares for the last greasy dinner he had brewed in his frying-pan. There were no deck hands bundled into their bunks. Perry rapped on the chain-box and inquired if anybody was within, and nobody answering, he had to ventriloquize a negative.
The engine-room, too, was vacant, and quite as unsavory as the other dens on board. Perry patronized the engine by a pull or two at the valves, and continued his tour of inspection.
The Ambuster's skiff, lying on her forward deck, seemed to entertain him vastly.
"Jolly!" says Perry. And so it was a jolly boat in the literal, not the technical sense.
"The three wise men of Gotham went to sea in a bowl; and here's the identical craft," says Perry.
He gave the chubby little machine a push with his foot. It rolled and wallowed about grotesquely. When it was still again, it looked so comic, lying contentedly on its fat side like a pudgy baby, that Perry had a roar of laughter, which, like other laughter to one's self, did not sound very merry, particularly as the north-wind was howling ominously, and the broken ice on its downward way was whispering and moaning and talking on in a most mysterious and inarticulate manner.
"Those sheets of ice would crunch up this skiff, as pigs do a punkin," thinks Perry.
And with this thought in his head he looked out on the river, and fancied the foolish little vessel cast loose and buffeting helplessly about in the ice.
He had been so busy until now, in prying about the steamboat and making up his mind that Captain and men had all gone off for a comfortable supper on shore, that his eyes had not wandered toward the stream.
Now his glance began to follow the course of the icy current. He wondered where all this supply of cakes came from, and how many of them would escape the stems of ferry-boats below and get safe to sea.
All at once, as he looked lazily along the lazy files of ice, his eyes caught a black object drifting on a fragment in a wide way of open water opposite Skerrett's Point, a mile distant.
Perry's heart stopped beating. He uttered a little gasping cry. He sprang ashore, not at all like a Doge quitting a Bucentaur. He tore back to the Foundry, dashing through the puddles, and, never stopping to pick up his cap, burst in upon Wade and Bill Tarbos in the office.
The boy was splashed from head to foot with red mud. His light hair, blown wildly about, made his ashy face seem paler. He stood panting.
His dumb terror brought back to Wade's mind all the bad omens of the morning.
"Speak!" said he, seizing Perry fiercely by the shoulder.
The uproar of the Works seemed to hush for an instant, while the lad stammered faintly,—
"There's somebody carried off in the ice by Skerrett's Point. It looks like a woman. And there's nobody to help."
CHAPTER XII
IN THE ICE
"Help! help!" shouted the four triphammers, bursting in like a magnified echo of the boy's last word.
"Help! help!" all the humming wheels and drums repeated more plaintively.
Wade made for the river.
This was the moment all his manhood had been training and saving for.
For this he had kept sound and brave from his youth up.
As he ran, he felt that the only chance of instant help was in that queer little bowl-shaped skiff of the "Ambuster."
He had never been conscious that he had observed it; but the image had lain latent in his mind, biding its time. It might be ten, twenty precious moments before another boat could be found. This one was on the spot to do its duty at once.
"Somebody carried off,—perhaps a woman," Wade thought. "Not—No, she would not neglect my warning! Whoever it is, we must save her from this dreadful death!"
He sprang on board the little steamboat. She was swaying uneasily at her moorings, as the ice crowded along and hammered against her stem. Wade stared from her deck down the river, with all his life at his eyes.
More than a mile away, below the hemlock-crested point, was the dark object Perry had seen, still stirring along the edges of the floating ice. A broad avenue of leaden-green water wrinkled by the cold wind separated the field where this figure was moving from the shore. Dark object and its footing of gray ice were drifting deliberately farther and farther away.
For one instant Wade thought that the terrible dread in his heart would paralyze him. But in that one moment, while his blood stopped flowing and his nerves failed, Bill Tarbos overtook him and was there by his side.
"I brought your cap," says Bill, "and our two coats."
Wade put on his cap mechanically. This little action calmed him.
"Bill," said he, "I'm afraid it is a woman,—a dear friend of mine,—a very dear friend."
Bill, a lover, understood the tone.
"We'll take care of her between us," he said.
The two turned at once to the little tub of a boat.
Oars? Yes,—slung under the thwarts,—a pair of short sculls, worn and split, but with work in them still. There they hung ready,—and a rusty boat-hook, besides.
"Find the thole-pins, Bill, while I cut a plug for her bottom out of this broomstick," Wade said.
This was done in a moment. Bill threw in the coats.
"Now, together!"
They lifted the skiff to the gangway. Wade jumped down on the ice and received her carefully. They ran her along, as far as they could go, and launched her in the sludge.
"Take the sculls, Bill. I'll work the boat-hook in the bow."
Nothing more was said. They thrust out with their crazy little craft into the thick of the ice-flood. Bill, amidships, dug with his sculls in among the huddled cakes. It was clumsy pulling. Now this oar and now that would be thrown out. He could never get a full stroke.
Wade in the bow could do better. He jammed the blocks aside with his boat-hook. He dragged the skiff forward. He steered through the little open ways of water.
Sometimes they came to a broad sheet of solid ice. Then it was "Out with her, Bill!" and they were both out and sliding their bowl so quick over, that they had not time to go through the rotten surface. This was drowning business; but neither could be spared to drown yet.
In the leads of clear water, the oarsman got brave pulls and sent the boat on mightily. Then again in the thick porridge of brash ice they lost headway, or were baffled and stopped among the cakes. Slow work, slow and painful; and for many minutes they seemed to gain nothing upon the steady flow of the merciless current.
A frail craft for such a voyage, this queer little half-pumpkin! A frail and leaky shell. She bent and cracked from stem to stern among the nipping masses. Water oozed in through her dry seams. Any moment a rougher touch or a sharper edge might cut her through. But that was a risk they had accepted. They did not take time to think of it, nor to listen to the crunching and crackling of the hungry ice around. They urged straight on, steadily, eagerly, coolly, spending and saving strength.
Not one moment to lose! The shattering of broad sheets of ice around them was a warning of what might happen to the frail support of their chase. One thrust of the boat-hook sometimes cleft a cake that to the eye seemed stout enough to bear a heavier weight than a woman's.
Not one moment to spare! The dark figure, now drifted far below the hemlocks of the Point, no longer stirred. It seemed to have sunk upon the ice and to be resting there weary and helpless, on one side a wide way of lurid water, on the other half a mile of moving desolation.
Far to go, and no time to waste!
"Give way, Bill! Give way!"
"Ay, ay!"
Both spoke in low tones, hardly louder than the whisper of the ice around them.
By this time hundreds from the Foundry and the village were swarming upon the wharf and the steamboat.
"A hunderd tar-barrels wouldn't git up my steam in time to do any good," says Cap'n Ambuster. "If them two in my skiff don't overhaul the man, he's gone."
"You're sure it's a man?" says Smith Wheelwright.
"Take a squint through my glass. I'm dreffully afeard it's a gal; but suthin's got into my eye, so I can't see."
Suthin' had got into the old fellow's eye,—suthin' saline and acrid,—namely, a tear.
"It's a woman," says Wheelwright,—and suthin' of the same kind blinded him also.
Almost sunset now. But the air was suddenly filled with perplexing snow-dust from a heavy squall. A white curtain dropped between the anxious watchers on the wharf and the boatmen.
The same white curtain hid the dark floating object from its pursuers.
There was nothing in sight to steer by, now.
Wade steered by his last glimpse,—by the current,—by the rush of the roaring wind,—by instinct.
How merciful that in such a moment a man is spared the agony of thought!
His agony goes into action, intense as life.
It was bitterly cold. A swash of ice-water filled the bottom of the skiff. She was low enough down without that. They could not stop to bail, and the miniature icebergs they passed began to look significantly over the gunwale. Which would come to the point of foundering first, the boat or the little floe it aimed for?
Bitterly cold! The snow hardly melted upon Tarbox's bare hands. His fingers stiffened to the oars; but there was life in them still, and still he did his work, and never turned to see how the steersman was doing his.
A flight of crows came sailing with the snow-squall. They alighted all about on the hummocks, and curiously watched the two men battling to save life. One black impish bird, more malignant or more sympathetic than his fellows, ventured to poise on the skiff's stern!
Bill hissed off this third passenger. The crow rose on its toes, let the boat slide away from under him, and followed croaking dismal good wishes.
The last sunbeams were now cutting in everywhere. The thick snow-flurry was like a luminous cloud. Suddenly it drew aside.
The industrious skiff had steered so well and made such headway, that there, a hundred yards away, safe still, not gone, thank God! was the woman they sought.
A dusky mass flung together on a waning rood of ice,—Wade could see nothing more.
Weary or benumbed, or sick with pure forlornness and despair, she had drooped down and showed no sign of life.
The great wind shook the river. Her waning rood of ice narrowed, foot by foot, like an unthrifty man's heritage. Inch by inch its edges wore away, until the little space that half-sustained the dark heap was no bigger than a coffin-lid.
Help, now!—now, men, if you are to save! Thrust, Richard Wade, with your boat-hook! Pull, Bill, till your oars snap! Out with your last frenzies of vigor! For the little raft of ice, even that has crumbled beneath its burden, and she sinks,—sinks, with succor close at hand!
Sinks! No,—she rises and floats again.
She clasps something that holds her head just above water. But the unmannerly ice has buffeted her hat off. The fragments toss it about,—that pretty Amazonian hat, with its alert feather, all drooping and draggled. Her fair hair and pure forehead are uncovered for an astonished sunbeam to alight upon.
"It is my love, my life, Bill! Give way, once more!"
"Way enough! Steady! Sit where you are, Bill, and trim boat, while I lift her out. We cannot risk capsizing."
He raised her carefully, tenderly, with his strong arms.
A bit of wood had buoyed her up for that last moment. It was a broken oar with a deep fresh gash in it.
Wade knew his mark,—the cut of his own skate-iron. This busy oar was still resolved to play its part in the drama.
The round little skiff just bore the third person without sinking.
Wade laid Mary Damer against the thwart. She would not let go her buoy. He unclasped her stiffened hands. This friendly touch found its way to her heart. She opened her eyes and knew him.
"The ice shall not carry off her hat to frighten some mother, down stream," says Bill Tarbox, catching it.
All these proceedings Cap'n Ambuster's spy-glass announced to Dunderbunk.
"They're h'istin' her up. They've slumped her into the skiff. They're puttin' for shore. Hooray!"
Pity a spy-glass cannot shoot cheers a mile and a half!
Perry Purtett instantly led a stampede of half Dunderbunk along the railroad-track to learn who it was and all about it.
All about it was, that Miss Damer was safe and not dangerously frozen,—and that Wade and Tarbox had carried her up the hill to her mother at Peter Skerrett's.
Missing the heroes in chief, Dunderbunk made a hero of Cap'n Ambuster's skiff. It was transported back on the shoulders of the crowd in triumphal procession. Perry Purtett carried round the hat for a contribution to new paint it, new rib it, new gunwale it, give it new sculls and a new boat-hook,—indeed, to make a new vessel of the brave little bowl.
"I'm afeard," says Cap'n Ambuster, "that, when I git a harnsome new skiff, I shall want a harnsome new steamboat, and then the boat will go to cruisin' round for a harnsome new Cap'n."
And now for the end of this story.
Healthy love-stories always end in happy marriages.
So ends this story, begun as to its love portion by the little romance of a tumble, and continued by the bigger romance of a rescue.
Of course there were incidents enough to fill a volume, obstacles enough to fill a volume, and development of character enough to fill a tome thick as "Webster's Unabridged," before the happy end of the beginning of the Wade-Damer joint history.
But we can safely take for granted that the lover being true and manly, and the lady true and womanly, and both possessed of the high moral qualities necessary to artistic skating, they will go on understanding each other better, until they are as one as two can be.
