LAUNCHING THE DORY.
"Just the time to take a little row," thought Olly Burdeen, as he
strolled about, looking sometimes admiringly at his new clothes and the
gay watch-guard, and sometimes casting wistful glances at the sea.
He knew the thrilling pleasure of crossing and recrossing the breakers in
a good boat, and rocking on the swells outside.
"I believe I'll try it once," he said. "Maybe I can see the yacht around
the point."
The point was a rocky arm of the shore which shut off the ocean view on
the north-east, the direction from which the Susette was expected. But
the little harbor it would have to enter was a deep cove in the broken
coast at the other end of the beach, a quarter of a mile away.
"It can't possibly come in without my seeing it in season," thought Olly,
with a glance at the watch, which he took from his pocket and opened and
shut again with a sort of guilty joy, for the twentieth time.
There were a couple of dories drawn up above high-water mark; and he knew
where a pair of old battered oars were hidden under a row of
bathing-houses close by. He drew them out and threw them on the sand.
Then he looked at the seaweed in his way,--little windrows of it
littering the beach, and dark masses rolling in the surf. The tide had
been going out about three hours.
"I can get through that easily enough," he said.
He dragged the lightest of the dories down to the water's edge, and put
in the oars. He knew just how it should be launched, and understood the
necessity of sending it straight across the breakers, and of never, by
any chance, letting them strike it sidewise.
Placing himself at the upper end, he waited for a good wave, and pushed
the boat into it,--running with it until his feet were almost in the
water, then holding it firmly until another wave lifted it. Just as that
was subsiding, he gave the dory another push, leaped in at the same time,
caught up the oars, and had them in the rowlocks and in the water just as
the third wave came.
So far, so good. He had done the same thing many times before, and had
never met with an accident. Two or three sturdy strokes, and he would
have been safe outside the rollers. But at a critical moment he paused to
look at a few spatters of water on his new clothes; and on the instant
one of his oars caught in a whirling tangle of kelp.
The boat was going out swiftly in one direction; the billow that bore the
kelp was rushing in with tremendous force in the other. No one knows the
power of a wave, who has not felt it at some such crisis. What happened
was over so quickly that Olly himself could not have explained it. A
brief struggle, a terrible wrench, a buffet in the breast and face from
the end of an oar,--and he was lying on his back in the dory with his
heels above the thwarts.
For a few seconds he lay there, half stunned by the blow and the fall.
His breath seemed to have been quite knocked out of his body. It did not
take him long to recover it, however, and to reverse the positions of his
head and his heels. When he did so, he found the boat swinging around
broadside to the breakers, with one threatening at that very moment to
overwhelm it.
Instinctively he seized an oar and pulled with all his might to head the
dory to the wave. He succeeded, and sent it careening safely over it and
the next great swell, and so out to sea.
But it was at the expense of the oar. It was an old one, much worn by the
friction of the rowlocks, and his last stroke broke it short off at the
weak point. The paddle-end fell overboard, and only the handle remained
in his hand.
He then turned to look for the other oar, and found that he had lost it
at the time of his tumble. He could see it going over on a breaker,
several rods behind him. For now the wind took the dory, and was wafting
it away almost as rapidly as if it carried a sail.
He tried paddling with the stub that remained in his hand, but made so
little headway with it that he began to be seriously alarmed. He had been
sufficiently startled by his accident and the danger of an overturn in
the rollers; but he now saw himself in face of an unforeseen peril.
He at first thought he would jump overboard and swim to the beach; but
even then he remembered his clothes, which a wetting might ruin--to say
nothing of Mr. Hatville's watch.
There was, besides, another danger. The kelp! He was a good swimmer; but
could he ever make his way through breakers in which such fields of
sea-weed tossed and rolled?
The night was shutting down with gathering clouds. The wind struck the
skiff with a force he had not felt under the lee of the woods. Not a
human being was in sight, nor a boat--only two or three distant sails on
the horizon.
"Oh, the yacht! Where is the yacht?" he cried aloud, gazing eagerly
around the point of rocks, the view beyond which was rapidly opening as
he drifted out to sea.
A little while before, he would have been sorry enough to have had the
Susette come in before he had time to land and run back to the
boarding-house with the borrowed watch; but now he wished for nothing so
devoutly as that it might come along and pick him up--so much worse
things might happen than the discovery of the time-piece in his
possession.
But no yacht hove in sight. The glory had faded out of the sky. The sea
darkened; the wind increased. He shouted for help, though with little
hope of making himself heard.
There were only women at the boarding-house, and even if his voice
reached them, it must have sounded so faint and far away as to attract no
especial attention. But the upper windows were visible over the
sand-hills. Perhaps somebody, perhaps Amy Canfield herself, was gazing
from them.
In that hope he swung his hat with frantic gestures of distress, still
screaming for help, as he drifted away on the darkening waters.
(_To be continued._)
GEORGE WASHINGTON.
[_An Historical Biography._]
BY HORACE E. SCUDDER.