The Panther gave a little grunt and a smile. He was used to Minny's

lectures, and he followed us both into the kitchen, where she made him sit

down by the fire and took off his wet blanket, waiting on him like a

daughter, and scolding him gently meanwhile. The old gentleman had of late

years been subject to rheumatism, and it was too likely that this exposure

would bring on another attack. The Panther patted her two little hands

between his own. Like most of his race, he had beautiful hands, soft and

rounded even in his old age, with long taper fingers that had, I dare say,

taken more than one scalp in their time.

"Pooh!" said he, lightly. "You think old Ingin melt like maple sugar? You

well?" he asked, anxiously.

"Quite so."

"And little one?"

"As well as a little pig, fast asleep in the other room."

"Where your husband?"

"Gone over to the railroad on business."

"And yours?" he asked, turning to me.

"Gone to Carysville. Do you know anything about him? is anything the

matter?" I asked, a little alarmed at his persistent questioning and an

indefinite something in the old man's tone and manner.

"Oh no," said he, earnestly. "I come right over from our place."

"Walked from the reservation in this storm!" said I. "What could have made

you do such a thing?"

"Nothing--just to see you. Not very strange come see two nice women," said

the old gentleman, with a little complimentary bow.

The Panther was somewhat vain of his knowledge of what he called "white

manners," but I never saw a white man who could be so gently dignified, so

courteous, so altogether charming in manner, as the old chief when he

chose. He hardly knew one letter from another, but he had had sixty-five

years of experience in war and council. Many a man "got up regardless of

expense" in college and society might have taken lessons in deportment

from this old Pottawatomie. He had known Minny from her childhood. Her

father's farm had been the first clearing in all that part of the country.

Deacon Adams had always been on excellent terms with the Indians, and his

little daughter had found her earliest playmates among their children. The

Panther had carried Minny in his arms when she was a baby; and as his own

family of boys and girls died one after another, he clung closer to the

child who had been their pet as well as his own.

The Panther was one of those big, soft, easy men who seem made to be ruled

by one woman or another. He was greatly respected in his tribe, and had

much influence. When they had been a nation he had been one of their most

distinguished warriors, and his word had been law. He had always

maintained toward the "young men" a somewhat imperious manner. He had

conducted himself with dignity and decision in all his visits to

Washington, where he had been a great lion, and in all his dealings with

the United States he had shown much wisdom and ability. But report said

that when once within the domestic circle and before his squaw, the

diplomatist and warrior was exceedingly meek. He bore his wife's death

with resignation, but he had never married again. He loved Minny Adams

better than anything on earth, and the girl had great influence over him.

She, in her turn, was very fond of him. From her earliest years he had

been her friend, confidant and admirer. He looked so fierce and dangerous,

and was so kind and simple, that the alliance between the girl and himself

was very much like that between a little child and a big mastiff--the

child protected and leader, the dog protector and led.

Minny made flannel shirts for him, and he wore them: she trimmed his

moccasins, and the dainty cambric ruffles which he wore when in grand

costume were got up by her hands. The Panther, however, did not often

appear in full dress. She tried to teach him to read, and she did get him

through the alphabet, but he greatly preferred hearing stories read to

learning to do it for himself, and was especially fond of the _Arabian

Nights_, which he quite believed. She even coaxed him to go to church with

her, and might have made a convert of him but for the interference of an

exceedingly silly young clergyman. The Panther rather liked to hear the

Bible, but I fear he was more attracted by the sound than the sense: his

favorite chapter was the story of David and Goliah. He used to say that

"Ingin religion was good for Ingin, and white religion was good for white

man." However, he never offered the least opposition to the missionary who

had settled among his people: indeed, he rather patronized that gentleman.

He and Wyanota were excellent friends. It was good to see the deference

and respect with which the younger man treated the elder. I always said

that it was the Panther who made the match between Minny and Mr. Moore.

Their house was one of his homes, and he was a frequent guest at our own.

He petted and spoiled my two children: he was very soft and kind to me,

whom he called "Mamma," after Wyn's example, and he considered that my

husband "understood good manners"--a compliment which he did not pay to

every one.

A dear little daughter whom we had lost had been very fond of him: the

child had died in his arms. I was alone at the time, and the old man's

sympathy was such a comfort to me in my trouble that for his own sake, as

well as for our little girl's, he had become very dear to us.

For an Indian, the Panther might be called almost a sober character. He

was seldom drunk more than four or five times a year, and when he was, he

always was very careful to keep out of the way of his white friends until

he was sober, when he would lecture the young men on the evils of

intemperance in most impressive fashion. He was a good deal of an orator,

possessing a voice of great sweetness and power; and though he was such an

immense creature, all his movements were light and graceful as those of a

kitten. He could speak perfectly good, even elegant, English when he

chose, but he did not always choose, and generally omitted the pronouns;

but his voice, manner and gestures in speaking were perfectly charming

when he was in a good temper. When he was not, he was somewhat awful, but

it was only under great provocation that he became savage. In general, he

was an amiable, kind, lazy creature, whom it was very easy to love.

I could not but wonder that night, as I set out the table and made the

coffee, what had brought the Panther so far in such wild weather. He did

not seem like himself. He was usually very conversable, and would chat

away by the hour together, in a fashion half shrewd, half simple, often

very interesting; but now he was silent and _distrait_.

"Carry," said Mrs. Moore, "are there not some of Wyn's things here yet in

that old trunk in your lumber-room?"

"Yes. Perhaps you can find something the chief can put on, and bring down

a pair of the captain's socks and slippers."

"Oh, never mind, never mind," said the damp giant.

"But I will mind," said the little woman; and she went out and soon

returned with the things, which she insisted he should go and put on.

"Well, always one woman or another," said the Panther in a tone of

resignation: "always squaw git her own way. You see that little girl,

mamma? Could squeeze her up just like a rabbit. Always she order me round

since she so high, and I just big fool enough let her;" and he went into

the next room, and presently came out arrayed in dry garments, as to his

upper man at least. I set the table with the best I had in the house, and

Minny and I sat down to get a cup of coffee with our guest.

At any other time the old gentleman would have purred and talked over this

little feast like an amiable old cat, but now he was rather silent; and I

noticed that in the pauses of the wind he would stop as though listening

for some expected sound. I began to think he was concealing from me some

misfortune or danger, and the same thought was evidently in Minny's mind,

for she watched him anxiously.

When we went back into the parlor the Panther walked to the baby's crib,

and stood for a moment looking at the sleeping child with a tenderness

which softened his whole aspect. Then he asked for the little boys.

"They are fast asleep in the next room," I said. "Go and look at them, and

you will be sure."

The Panther smiled, but he went into my room, which opened from the

parlor, and bending down softly kissed the two little faces resting on the

same pillow.

I drew a large chair to the fire for him, and Minny filled his pipe, for I

had "followed the drum" too long to object to smoking. The giant stretched

his length of limb before the fire, but he did not seem quite at ease,

even under the influence of the tobacco. He looked a little troubled and

anxious, and lifted his head once or twice with a sudden motion, like a

dog who has misgivings that something is wrong out-doors.

The baby stirred in her sleep, and the chief began gently to rock the

cradle. "'Spose she order me about too, by and by," he said, "like her

mother."

"Oh, you like to make that out," said Minny, "because you are such a great

big, strong man. If you were a little bit of a creature, you would always

be standing on your dignity to make yourself look tall. The last time Wyn

and I were at Detroit we went to church, and I heard the very smallest man

I ever saw preach a tremendous sermon about the man being the head of the

woman, insisting mightily on the respect we all owe to the other sex. When

we came out I asked Wyn what he thought, and he said he thought it was

exactly such a sermon as such a very tiny man might be expected to

preach."

"Ah! and he heard you both, my dear," said I; "and he says Mr. Moore has

no element of reverence in his character!"

Here the Panther dropped his pipe, and starting from his chair looked like

his namesake just ready for a spring, as the sharp, quick bark of a little

dog was heard from the nearest house.

"Only dog," he said in a tone of relief, and resumed his smoking.

"Uncle," said Minny, "I do wish you would tell me what the matter is, or

what you are listening for. You make me think there is something wrong."

I looked up and seconded Minny's request.

"'Spose I tell you, you think it all Ingin nonsense," he said, looking a

little embarrassed.

"Even if I did, sir, I should feel more comfortable," I said.

"Yes, do tell us, please," said Minny, earnestly.

"Well, then," said the old man, speaking with an effort, "last night went

out after a coon--up in the woods right back of here--"

"Yes: well?"

"And went up on that little hill over your pasture, and then," said the

old man lowering his voice and speaking with great earnestness, "hear _red

fox bark_--one, two, three times out loud, and then again farther off.

There, now!"

I was greatly relieved at finding that I was threatened by nothing worse

than the oracle of the red fox. I knew the Indian superstition that if

this animal is heard to bark anywhere near a dwelling, he foretells death

within twenty-four hours to some one beneath its roof.

"But," said I, "the red fox is only a sign for Indians. He does not bark

for white people, and you were not under a roof at the time, so it cannot

apply to you."

"Don't know!" said the Panther, shaking his head. "Never know that sign

fail. Then here this little woman and this baby--all the same as Ingin

now."

Minny looked a little troubled. In spite of his reading, his college

education and mathematics, Wyanota had sundry queer notions and

superstitions, about which he very seldom spoke, but which nevertheless

had some weight with him, and it is possible that he had in some degree

communicated his ideas to his wife.

"I don't believe in signs," said Minny, but nevertheless she looked

annoyed.

"So I thought," said the chief with a little smile. "Know mamma here think

it all nonsense, or else come over this morning to tell her. Then think

she not believe it and not mind, and so keep quiet. Then storm come up and

wind blow, and couldn't stand it; so set out and walk over here to take

care of her; and she--maybe she laugh at me?"

"No indeed, sir," said I, greatly touched by the anxious affection which

had brought the old man so far in such weather. "How good you are to me!

You mean to stay here to-night of course, and in the morning you will see

that the red fox was simply barking for his own amusement; but I am sorry

he drove you to take such a toilsome walk, though we are glad to have you

here."

"My business take care of you when your men gone. Got no one my own

blood," he said, rather sadly: "boys dead, girl dead, squaw dead--no one

but you two care much for old man."

Minny went and kissed him softly. "You know I belong to you," she said,

"and baby has no grandfather but you."

"Ah! your father!" said the Panther, rocking the cradle. "He and I always

good friends. 'Member when you come, your mother she got no milk for you,

poor little starved thing! My squaw she lose her baby--nice little boy

too," said the old man, with a sigh--"she tell your mother she nurse you;

so she did. You git fat and rosy right off. You all the same one of us

after that. No spoil your pretty white skin, though," said the Panther,

patting Minny's cheek with his brown fingers. "Seem just like that happen

yesterday: now you got baby yourself. Ah! your father--mighty well pleased

he be 'spose he see that little one."

"How often I wish he could!" said "Minny with a sigh, for both her father

and mother were dead.

"You 'pend upon it, he comfortable somewhere," said the chief,

consolingly. "Deacon Adams, he real good man. Look here, mamma! Like to

ask you question. You say when we die white man go to one place, Indian go

to another--"

"I don't say so, sir. I don't pretend to know all this world by heart,

much less the other."

"Well, that what Indian say, any way. Now 'spose that so, what come of

half-breed, eh?"

"What do you think?" I asked, for neither Minny nor I could venture an

opinion on this abstruse point.

"Don't know," said the old man. "Saw young Cherokee in Washington: he

marry pretty little schoolmistress go down there to teach, and their

little boy die. Then that young man feel bad, and he fret good deal 'bout

where that baby gone to, and he ask me, and I no able tell him. Guess me

find out when get there: no use to trouble till then, You make these?" he

asked, changing the subject, and looking with admiration at the captain's

embroidered slippers which I had lent him.

"Yes. They were pretty when they were new. I'll make you a pair just like

them, if you wish. Shall I?"

The old gentleman looked greatly delighted, for he was as fond of finery

as any girl, and took no small pride in adorning his still handsome

person.

I brought out all my embroidery-patterns, and the giant took as much

pleasure as a child in the pretty painted pictures and gay-colored wools

and silks. I made all the conversation I could over the slippers, willing

to divert him from the melancholy which seemed to have taken possession of

his mind. Over my work-basket he brightened a little, and chatted away

quite like himself, and listened with pleasure to Minny's singing. We did

not rise to go to bed till eleven o'clock, which was a very late hour for

Maysville. When the Panther spent the night at our house, as was

frequently the case, he never would go regularly to bed, but would take

his blanket and lie down before the kitchen fire. With great politeness he

insisted on getting the wood ready for morning, a thing he never would

have dreamed of doing for a woman of his own race.

As he came back into the kitchen from the shed he took up his rifle, which

he had set down by the door. As he did so an angry look came over his

face. "Look here," he said: "somebody been spoil my rifle!"

I looked at the piece in surprise, for the lock was broken. "It cannot

have been done since you came," I said. "There is no one in the house but

ourselves."

"Of course not, of course not!" said the Panther, eager to show that he

had no suspicion of his friends.

"Did you stop anywhere on your way?"

"Yes," said he with some slight embarrassment. "Stop at Ryan's,"

mentioning a low tavern on the borders of the reservation, which was a

terrible thorn in the side of all the missionary's efforts. "Stop a minute

light my pipe, but no drink one drop," he added with great earnestness;

"but they ask me good deal."

"Did you put your gun down?"

"Guess so," he said after a moment's reflection. "Yes, know did put it

down a minute or two."

"Then that was when the mischief was done, you may be sure. This lock was

never broken by accident. It must have been a mere piece of spite because

you would not stay. I wonder you did not notice it when you came out."

"In a hurry, and kept the buckskin over it, not to git it wet. Wish knew

who did that," said he, with a look not good to see. "Guess not do it

again."

"I am very sorry, but it can easily be mended."

I spread out on the floor for him the comfortable and blankets I had

brought for his use, and hung up his woolen hunting-frock, now quite dry.

As I took it into my hand, I felt something very heavy in the pocket.

"I hope you have nothing here that will be spoiled with wet?" I said.

"Oh, nothing but money," said the chief, carelessly. "Mean to tell Minny

to take some of it and buy clothes for me."

He took out as he spoke a handful of loose change--copper, silver and two

or three gold-pieces--and a roll of bills a good deal damp, and put it all

into my apron. I counted the money and found there were seventy-five

dollars. Strong indeed must have been the attraction which had brought the

old man away from the tavern-fire in his sober senses with such a sum of

money in his pocket.

"Just got that," he said. "Part from Washington, part sell deer-skins."

There was no need to tell me that it had not been long in his possession.

Money in the Panther's hands was like water in a sieve.

"You give me five dollars, give the rest to Minny," he said; and as this

was by much the wisest arrangement for him, I did as he wished.

"You got captain's gun?" he asked me. "Never like to go to sleep without

something to catch up: hit somebody 'spose somebody come."

"I am sorry to say the captain has his rifle with him, and I lent the

shotgun to Jim Brewster this afternoon."

He looked annoyed, but he went out into the woodshed and returned with the

axe, which was new and sharp. "Have something, anyway," he said, doggedly.

"Why, what do you think can possibly happen?"

"Don't know. Always like to have something to catch up. Good-night, mamma.

You go to sleep."

I went to bed and fell asleep almost on the minute, but I could not have

slept long when I was wakened by the noise of the wind against the

shutters. The rain had ceased, but the blast was still roaring without.

Minny and her child were in a room which opened out of the parlor opposite

my own. The lamp which was burning there threw a dim light into my

chamber, and showed me each familiar object and my little boys asleep

beside me.

Some one says that between the hours of one and four in the morning the

human mind is not itself. I fully believe it. In those hours you do not

"fix your mind" on melancholy subjects--they fix themselves upon you. If

you turn back into the past, there comes up before you every occasion on

which you made a fool of yourself, every lost opportunity, every slight

injury you ever experienced. If you look at the future, you see nothing

but coming failure and disappointment. The present moment connects itself

with every tale you ever heard or read of ghosts, murder, vampires or

robbers.

That night, either because of the wind or because I had taken too strong

coffee, I fell into "the fidgets," as this state of mind is sometimes

called, and selected for immediate cause of discomfort the Panther's

presentiment about the red fox. Who could explain the mysterious way in

which animals are warned of approaching danger? Perhaps the old science of

divination was not so entirely a delusion; and then I remembered all the

old stories in Roman history of people who had come to grief by neglecting

the oracles. The old idea that whatever incident is considered as an omen

will be such in reality, seemed to me at that hour of the night not wholly

an unreasonable theory.

I had known, to be sure, some fifty presentiments which came to nothing,

but then I had known as many as three which had been verified: perhaps the

present case might be one of the exceptions to the rule. Then I remembered

all the stories in Scott's _Demonology_, which I had lately read, and

quite forgot all the arguments intended to disprove them.

[Illustration: The Attack on the "Panther."]

I thought of the broken gun-lock: I thought it not improbable that the

Panther had, when at Ryan's, mentioned that he was coming to our house,

and that it was very likely he had let it appear that he carried his money

with him. Ryan's was one of the worst places in all the State. I

remembered that the money was in the house, and I began to wish, like the

Panther, that I had something to "catch up." Then there were so many

noises about! I heard footsteps, which you will always hear if you listen

for them on a windy night. When our petted old cat jumped from his place

on the parlor sofa to lie down before the fire, I started up in bed in a

sudden fright.

I must have been in this uncomfortable state of mind and body for the best

part of an hour before I remembered that in a drawer in the front parlor

lay two little old-fashioned pistols, unloaded but in good order.

I had grown so excited and uneasy that I felt as if I could not rest

unless I got up, found those pistols and loaded them, though nobody had

ever heard of a burglary in Maysville, and half the time the doors were

left unlocked at night. Rather despising myself for my nervousness, but

yielding to it nevertheless, I rose, put on my dressing-gown and slippers,

lit my candle and went to find the two little pistols. I stepped very

softly, not to disturb Minny, for I should have been quite ashamed then to

have her know my cowardice. I looked in at the door as I passed. She was

sound asleep, with her baby on her arm. The baby, however, was broad

awake, but lying perfectly still, with her little finger in her mouth. Her

eyes shone in the lamplight as she turned them on me--not startled like

another child, but simply questioning. The little creature looked so

unnaturally wise and self-possessed that I was reminded perforce of a wild

tale Wyanota had once told me about a remote ancestress of his who had

married some sort of a wood-demon. The legend ran that Wyanota's family

was descended from the offspring of this marriage, and I think Wyn more

than half believed the story.

I passed on, and going into the next room found the pistols, carried them

back to my own chamber, and loaded them carefully. I was quite accustomed

to the use of firearms. There had been times in my life when I never sat

down to my work or went to rest without having rifle or pistol within easy

reach of my hand. When I had loaded the weapons, I put them on the table

by my bed and lay down again. My excitement seemed to have subsided, and I

was just falling asleep when I heard a door in the kitchen violently burst

open. I thought the wind had done it, and waited a moment to hear if the

Panther would rise and shut it.

The next instant there was a shot, a wild cry as of mingled pain and fury,

the sound of a heavy fall and a struggle. Before I had well realized that

the noise was in the house, I found myself at the kitchen door with my

pistols in my hand. I was greatly startled, but my one idea was to help my

old friend. The miserable door resisted me for a moment. Seconds passed

that seemed hours. When at last I tore it open, I saw a man in his shirt

sleeves lying dead on the floor, his head shattered apparently by a blow

from the axe: another, a large, powerful Irishman, was kneeling on the

Panther's breast, with his hands at the old man's throat.

I sprang forward, but something swifter than I darted past me with a

savage cry, and, tearing and biting with claws and teeth, flung itself

full at the ruffian's face and naked throat. It was our big old brindle

cat, Tom, roused from his place before the fire. The unexpected fierceness

of Tom's assault took the man quite by surprise. Before he could tear the

creature away I had the pistol at his head.

"If you move," I said, "I'll kill you;" for, as I saw that my old friend

was hurt, wrath took the place of fear.

He gave in directly. Indeed the cat, a large, powerful animal, had almost

scratched his eyes out. In the most abject tones the fellow implored me to

let him go.

"Don't you do it, mamma," said the Panther, faintly.

"I don't mean to," I said.

Under the kitchen stairs was a dark closet with a strong outside bolt. I

ordered the man into this place. He obeyed, and I drew the bolt upon him.

His face and throat were streaming with blood from Tom's teeth and claws.

All this passed in much less time than it takes to tell it. Roused by the

noise, the children, and Minny with the baby in her arms, were already in

the kitchen.

"Oh, my dear, my poor darling!" said Minny, kneeling by the old man's

side, "you are hurt!"

"Yes," he said, quietly, "pretty considerable bad. Charley, you fasten

that door;" for the door into the shed, which had been secured only by a

button, was wide open. "You get the hammer and two, three big nails, and

drive 'em in," he continued. "Maybe more them darn scamps round."

Charley obeyed directions in a way which did him credit. Little Ned, with

wide, surprised eyes, clung to me in silence; little Carry, seeing her

mother in tears, put up a piteous lip and sobbed in her unbaby-like,

sorrowful fashion; the old cat, in great excitement, went purring and

talking from one to another.

"Tell me where you are hurt," I said, holding the chief's hand.

He had been shot through the stomach with a great, old-fashioned

smooth-bore musket, which lay on the floor--a gun not carrying less than

twenty-five to the pound. I had seen gunshot wounds before, and I knew

that this was serious. It did not bleed much externally, but the edges of

the wound were torn and discolored.

"That fellow dead?" asked the Panther.

"Yes indeed!" for the man's head was split like a walnut.

The old warrior looked gratified. "Mamma," he said, touching his

hunting-knife, "you take that fellow's scalp."

"Don't think of such a thing," I said, not so much shocked as I might have

been had I not lived on the Indian frontier. "Do you know who they are?"

"See them to Ryan's. Guess they some folks that mizzable railroad bring

into this country. 'Spect they follow me. Mamma," said the Panther,

looking up into my face, "tell you, red fox not bark for nothing. Better

be old man than you."

"Oh, my dear old friend, if you had only not come to us to-night! It was

all your love for us that has done this, but I pray God you may get well.

Charley, do you think you can go for Doctor Beach?"

"Yes, mamma," said the boy, though he turned pale.

"No, no," said the Panther. "You no send that little fellow out in the

dark. Besides, no good. You go wrap yourselves up. You two, you git bad

cold."

At that moment we heard the sound of wheels and horses' feet.

"Go, Charley," said Minny. "Stop whoever it is, and tell them what has

happened."

Charley ran out, and soon returned with Dr. Beach, who, happily for us,

had been out on one of those errands which are always rousing doctors from

their beds.

Dr. Beach was a burly, rough-mannered sort of man, but he could be very

kind and tender in the exercise of his profession. He wasted no time in

questions, but looked grave when he saw how the old man was hurt.

"Needn't tell me," said the Panther, quietly. "Know it's the end. Kill one

of 'em, anyhow!" he concluded in a tone of calm satisfaction.

"And I wish with all my heart you had killed the other," said the doctor,

bitterly. "He got off, I suppose."

The Panther showed his white teeth in a laugh. "No," he said, pointing to

me: "she got him--she and the cat. Pretty well for one little squaw and

pussy-cat. Mamma, you keep that kitty always."

"Where is the scoundrel?" asked the doctor.

"Shut up in that closet."

Here the man within cried out that he was "kilt" already, and should be

hung if we did not let him go.

"I hope you will, with all my heart," said the doctor.

With some difficulty we helped the Panther into the parlor and laid him on

the sofa.

He told us the story in a few words. He had been asleep when the door was

burst open. The man whom he had killed had fired the shot. He had kept his

feet to strike one blow with the axe, and the other man had sprung upon

him as he fell.

The doctor did what little he could to ease his patient, and then went

away, but soon returned with some men from the village, who were quite

ready to lynch the criminal when they heard what he had done. They took

the man away, however, and I am happy to say he afterward received the

heaviest sentence the law would allow. He confessed that, knowing the

chief had a large sum in his possession, himself and his companion had

broken the lock of the rifle, intending to waylay the old man and shoot

him in the woods. They had not, however, been able to overtake him till he

reached the clearing, and then, fearing to encounter him, they had

followed him at a distance and watched him enter our house. Knowing that

the captain was gone, they had waited until all was quiet, and then made

their entrance as described.

The Panther asked that some one might go to the reservation and send over

three of his friends, whom he named. He was very anxious to see Wyanota,

and Calvin Bruce, who had come with the doctor, instantly volunteered to

take his trotting mare and do both errands. The chestnut did her work

gallantly, though unhappily in vain, for the old man did not live to see

his friends.

"Don't you fret, you two," he said, softly, as Minny and I watched over

him. "Great deal the best way for old Ingin. Die like a man now: not cough

myself to death, like an old dog. Minny, little girl, you tell your

husband be good to our people, well as he can. Not much of our nation left

now--not good for much, either," he added; "but you tell him and the

captain stand their friends, won't you?"

"Indeed, indeed they will," said Minny in tears.

A Methodist clergyman of some kind, who preached in Maysville at that

time, hearing what had happened, came in to offer his services and to pray

with the dying man. The Panther thanked him courteously, but he clung to

the simple creed of his fathers and his belief that "Ingin religion was

good for Ingin;" and Mr. Lawrence had the sense and feeling not to disturb

him by argument.

"Want your Charley to have my rifle," he said to me. "Nobody left of our

people but my cousin's son, and he most a mizzable Ingin. You 'member

that, please," he said to Mr. Lawrence, who sat quietly at the head of the

sofa. "Do you think," he asked wistfully of the clergyman, "that I ever

see these two again where I go?" The minister--Heaven bless him!--answered

stoutly that he had not a doubt of it. "All right, then," said the

Panther, quietly. "Now, mamma, you see red fox know, after all."

Minny brought her baby for him to kiss. Little Carry's dark eyes were full

of tears, for, like most babies, she felt the influence of sorrow she

could not understand. She did not scream, as another child would, but hid

her face on her mother's bosom and sobbed quietly, like a grown-up woman.

My two little boys, understanding all at once that their old friend was

going away, burst out crying.

"Hush! hush!" he said, gently. "You be good boys to your mother. Say

'good-bye.'"

We kissed him, keeping back the lamentations which we knew would trouble

him.

"Good-bye," he said, softly, and then he spoke some few words in his own

tongue, as Minny told me afterward, about going to his lost children. Then

a smile came over his face, a look of sweet relief and comfort softened

the stern features, the hand that had held mine so close slowly relaxed;

and with a sigh he was gone.

The old minister gently closed his eyes. "My dear," said Mr. Lawrence to

Minny, who was in an agony of grief, "God knows, but it was His Son who

said, 'Greater love hath no man than this--that a man lay down his life

for his friends!'"

When we buried the old chief we wrote those words on the stone we placed

over his grave.

Since then the New Year's Eve brings back to me very vividly the memory of

the augury that so strangely accomplished its own fulfillment.

CLARA F. GUERNSEY.

Louie.

The great river was flowing peacefully down to the sea, opening its blue

tides at the silver fretting of the bar into a shallow expanse some miles

in width, a part of which on either side overlay stretches where the

submerged eel-grass lent a tint of chrysoprase to the sheathing flow, and

into which one gazed, half expecting to see so ideal a depth peopled by

something other than the long ribbons of the weed streaming out on the

slow current--the only cool sight, albeit, beneath the withering heat of

the day across all that shining extent. Far down the shores, on the right,

a line of low sand-hills rose, protecting the placid harbor from sea and

storm with the bulwark of their dunes, whose yellow drifts were ranged by

the winds in all fantastic shapes, and bound together by ropes of the wild

poison-ivy and long tangles of beach-grass and the blossoming purple pea,

and which to-day cast back the rays of the sun as though they were of

beaten brass. Above these hills the white lighthouse loomed, the heated

air trembling around it, and giving it so vague and misty a guise that,

being by itself a thing of night and storm and darkness, it looked now as

unreal as a ghost by daylight. On the other side of the harbor lay the

marshes, threaded by steaming creeks, up which here and there the pointed

sails of the hidden hay-barges crept, the sunshine turning them to white

flames: farther off stood a screen of woods, and from brim to brim between

swelled the broad, smooth sheet of the river, coming from the great

mountains that gave it birth, washing clean a score of towns on its way,

and loitering just here by the pleasant old fishing-town, whose wharves,

once doing a mighty business with the Antilles and the farther Indies,

now, in the absence of their half dozen foreign-going craft, lay at the

mercy of any sand-droger that chose to fling her cable round their

capstans. A few idle masts swayed there, belonging to small fishers and

fruiters, a solid dew of pitch oozing from their sides in the sun, but not

a sail set: a lonely watchman went the rounds among them, a ragged urchin

bobbed for flounders in the dock, but otherwise wharves and craft were

alike forsaken, and the sun glared down on them as though his rays had

made them a desert. The harbor-water lay like glass: now and then the tide

stirred it, and all the brown and golden reflections of masts and spars

with it, into the likeness of a rippled agate. Not one of the boats that

were ordinarily to be seen darting hither and yon, like so many

water-bugs, were in motion now; none of the white sails of the gay

sea-parties were running up and swelling with the breeze; none of the

usual naked and natatory cherubs were diving off the wharves into that

deep, warm water; the windows on the seaward side of the town were closed;

the countless children, that were wont to infest the lower streets as if

they grew with no more cost or trouble than the grass between the bricks,

had disappeared in the mysterious way in which swarms of flies will

disappear, as if an east wind had blown them; but no east wind was blowing

here. In all the scene there was hardly any other sign of life than the

fervent sunbeams shedding their cruel lustre overhead: the river flowed

silent and lonely from shore to shore; the whole hot summer sky stretched

just as silent and lonely from horizon to horizon; only the old ferryman,

edging along the bank till he was far up stream, crossed the narrower tide

and drifted down effortless on the other side; only an old black brig lay

at anchor, with furled sail and silent deck, in the middle channel down

below the piers, and from her festering and blistering hull it was that

all the heat and loneliness and silence of the scene seemed to exude--for

it was the fever-ship.

It was a different picture on the bright river when that brig entered the

harbor on the return of her last voyage, to receive how different a

welcome! But pestilence raged abroad in the country now, and the people of

the port, who had so far escaped the evil, were loth to let it enter among

them at last, and had not yet recovered from the recoil of their first

shock and shiver at thought of it in their waters--waters than which none

could have fostered it more kindly, full as they were in their shallow

breadth of rotting weeds and the slime of sewers. Perhaps the owner of

some pale face looked through the pane and thought of brother or father,

or, it may be, of lover, and grew paler with pity, and longed to do kind

offices for those who suffered; but the greater part of all the people

hived upon the shores would have scouted the thought of going out with aid

to those hot pillows rocking there upon the tide, and of bringing back

infection to the town, as much as though the act had been piracy on the

high seas. And they stayed at home, and watched their vanes and longed for

an east wind--an east wind whose wings would shake out healing, whose

breath would lay the destroying fever low; but the east wind refused to

seek their shores, and chose rather to keep up its wild salt play far out

on the bosom of its mid-sea billows.

Yes, on that return of the last voyage of the brig the stream had swarmed

with boats, flags had fluttered from housetops and staffs, piers and quays

had been lined with cheering people, all flocking forth to see the broken,

battered little craft; for the brig had been spoken by a tug, and word had

been brought to the wharves, and had spread like wild-fire through the

town, that, wrecked in a tempest and deserted by the panic-stricken crew,

the steadfast master and a boy who stood by him had remained with her, had

refitted her as best they might when the storm abated, and had brought her

into port at last through fortunate days of fair weather and slow sailing.

The town was ringing with the exploit, with praise of the noble

faithfulness of master and boy; and now the river rang again, and no

conquering galley of naval hero ever moved through a gladder, gayer

welcome than that through which the little black brig lumbered on her

clumsy way to her moorings.

But though all the rest of the populace of the seaport had turned out with

their greetings that day, there was one little body there who, so far from

hurrying down to shore or sea-wall with a waving handkerchief, ran crying

into a corner; and it was there that Andrew Traverse, the person of only

secondary importance in the river scene, rated as a boy on the brig's

books, but grown into a man since the long voyage began,--it was there he

found her when the crowd had let him alone and left him free to follow his

own devices.

"It's the best part of all the welcome, I declare it is!" said he,

standing in the doorway and enjoying the sight before him a moment.

"Oh, Andrew," cried the little body with a sob, but crouching farther away

into the corner, "it was so splendid of you!"

"What was so splendid of me?" said he, still in the doorway, tall and

erect in the sunshine that lay around him, and that glanced along his red

shirt and his bronzed cheek to light a flame in the black eyes that

surveyed her.

"Standing by him so," she sobbed--"standing by the captain when the others

left--bringing home the ship!"

"It's not a ship--it's a brig," said Andrew, possibly too conscious of his

merit to listen to the praise of it. "Well, is this all? Ain't you going

to shake hands with me? Ain't you glad to see me?"

"Oh, Andrew! So glad!" and she turned and let him see the blushing, rosy

face one moment, the large, dark, liquid eyes, the tangled, tawny curls;

and then overcome once more, as a sudden shower overcomes the landscape,

the lips quivered again, the long-lashed eyelids fell, and the face was

hidden in another storm of tears. And then, perhaps because he was a

sailor, and perhaps because he was a man, his arms were round her and he

was kissing off those tears, and the little happy body was clinging to him

and trembling with excitement and with joy like a leaf in the wind.

Certainly no two happier, prouder beings walked along the sea-wall that

night, greeted with hearty hands at every step, followed by all eyes till

the shelter of deepening dusk obscured them, and with impish urchins,

awe-struck for once, crying mysteriously under their breath to each other,

"That's him! That's the feller saved the Sabrina! That's him and her!" How

proud the little body was! how her heart beat with pleasure at thought of

the way in which all men were ready to do him honor! how timidly she

turned her eyes upon him and saw the tint deepen on his cheek, the shadow

flash into light in his eye, the smile kindle on his lips, as he looked

down on her--glad with her pride and pleasure, strong, confident, content

himself--till step by step they had left the town behind, wandering down

the sandy island road, through the wayside hedge of blossoming wild roses

and rustling young birches, till they leaned upon the parapet of the old

island bridge and heard the water lap and saw the stars come out, and only

felt each other and their love in all the wide, sweet summer universe.

Poor Louie! She had always been as shy and wary as any little brown bird

of the woods. It was Andrew's sudden and glorious coming that had

surprised her into such expression of a feeling that had grown up with her

until it was a part of every thought and memory. And as for

Andrew--certainly he had not known that he cared for her so much until she

turned that tearful, rosy face upon him in welcome; but now it seemed to

him that she had been his and he hers since time began: he could neither

imagine nor remember any other state than this: he said to himself, and

then repeated it to her, that he had loved her always, that it was thought

of her that had kept him firm and faithful to his duty, that she had been

the lodestar toward which he steered on that slow homeward way; and he

thanked Heaven, no doubt devoutly enough, that had saved him from such

distress and brought him back to such bliss. And Louie listened and clung

closer, more joyful and more blest with every pulse of her bounding heart.

After all, sudden as the slipping into so divine a dream had been, it had

need to be full as intense and deep, for it was only for a little while it

lasted. A week's rapt walking in these mid-heavens, where earth and care

and each to-morrow was forgotten, and there broke in upon them the voice

of the Sabrina's owner seeking for Andrew Traverse.

Of course such conduct as that of one who preferred to do his utmost to

save a sinking ship rather than seek safety with her flying crew, was

something too unusual to go unrewarded: it must be signalized into such a

shining light that all other mariners must needs follow it. And if the sky

had fallen, Andrew declared, he could have been no more surprised than he

was when he found himself invited with great ceremony to a stately

tea-drinking at the house of the owner of the Sabrina. "Now we shall catch

larks," said he; and dressed in a new suit, whose gray tint set off the

smoothness of his tanned cheek with the color sometimes mantling through

the brown, he entered the house with all the composure of a gentleman used

to nothing but high days and holidays. Not that either the state or

ceremony at Mr. Maurice's required great effort to encounter with

composure--trivial enough at its best, wonderful though it was to the

townsfolk, unused to anything beyond. But Andrew had seen the world in

foreign parts, and neither Mr. Maurice's mansion-house and gardens, nor

his gay upholstery, nor his silver tea-service, nor his condescending

manners, struck the least spark of' surprise from Andrew's eyes, or gave

them the least shadow of awe.

"This is some mistake," said the owner graciously, after preliminary

compliment had been duly observed. "How is it that you are rated on the

books as a boy--you as much a man as you will ever be?"

"A long voyage, sir, slow sailing and delays over so many disasters as

befell us, three years out in the stead of a year and a half--all that

brings one to man's estate before his reckoning."

"But the last part of the time you must have done able seaman's service?"

"The captain and I together," said Andrew with his bright laugh. "We were

officers and crew and passengers, cox'n and cook, as they say."

"A hard experience," said Mr. Maurice.

"Oh, not at all, but worth its weight in gold--to me, at least. Why, sir,

it taught me how to handle a ship as six years before the mast couldn't

have done."

"Good! We shall see to what purpose one of these days. And you have had

your share of schooling, they tell me?"

"All that the academy had to give, sir."

"And that's enough for any one who has the world to tussel with. How

should you like to have gone through such hard lines, Frarnie?" turning to

his daughter, a pale, moon-faced girl, her father's darling.

"Were you never afraid?" she asked in her pretty simpering way.

"Not to say afraid," answered Andrew, deferentially. "We knew our

danger--two men alone in the leaky, broken brig--but then we could be no

worse off than we were before; and as for the others--"

"They got their deserts," said Mr. Maurice.

"The poor fellows left us in such a hurry that they took hardly any water

or biscuit; and at the worst our fate could not be so bad as theirs, under

the hot sun in those salt seas."

"Well, well!" said Mr. Maurice, who loved his own ease too much to like to

hear of others' dis-ease. And to turn the conversation from the possible

horrors into which it might lapse, he invited his guest out into his

gardens, among his grapehouses, his poultry and his dogs. It was a long

hour's ramble that they took there, well improved on both sides, for

Andrew of course knew it to be for his interest to please the brig's

owner; and Mr. Maurice, who prided himself on having a singularly keen

insight into character, studied the young man's every word and gesture,

for it was not often that he came across such material as this out of

which to make his captains; and to what farther effect in this instance be

pursued his studies might have been told, by any one keener than himself,

through the tone of satisfaction with which, on re-entering the parlor, he

bade his daughter take Andrew down the rooms and tell him the histories of

the surprising pictures there. For Mr. Maurice, one of the great fortunes

of the seaport, being possessed by a mania of belief that every youth who

cast tender eyes upon his daughter cast them not on her, but on her future

havings and holdings, had long since determined to select a husband for

her himself--one who evinced no servile reverence for wealth, one whom he

could trust to make her happy. "And here," he said, "I am not sure but

that I have him."

When Andrew went in to see Louie a moment on his way home that night, he

was in great spirits over the success of his visit, and, dark as it was,

made her blush the color of the rose over the low doorway where they stood

when he asked how she would like to go captain's wife next voyage. And

then he told her of Mr. Maurice's scrutiny and questioning, and the half

hint of a ship of his own to sail some day, and of the pale-faced Miss

Frarnie's interest, and of the long stroll down the parlors among the

pictures, the original of one of which he had seen somewhere in the

Mediterranean, when he and a parcel of sailors went ashore and rambled

through the port, and looked in at a church, where, in the midst of music

and incense and a kneeling crowd, they were shearing the golden locks off

of young girls and making nuns of them. And Andrew forgot to tell of the

way in which Miss Frarnie listened to him and hung upon his words: indeed,

how could he? Perhaps he did not notice it himself; but if he had had a

trifle more personal vanity, and had seen how this pale young

girl--forbidden by a suspicious father much companionship with

gallants--had forgotten all difference of station and purse, and had

looked upon him, nobly made, handsome, gay, knowing far more than she did,

much as upon a young god just alighted by her side a moment,--if Andrew

had been aware of this, and had found any words in which to repeat it,

then Louie might have had something to startle her out of her blessedness,

and pain might have come to her all the sooner. But since the pain would

have been as sharp then as at any future time, it was a pitying, pleasant

Fate that let her have her happiness as long as might be. For Louie's love

was a different thing from the selfish passion that any clown may feel:

she had been happy enough in her little round of commonplace satisfactions

and tasks before Andrew came and shed over her this great cloud of

delight--happy then just in the enjoyment of that secret love of hers that

went out and sought him every night sailing over foreign sunlit waters,

and hovered like a blessing round his head; and now that he had come and

folded her about and about with such warm devotion, it was not for the new

happiness he gave her that she loved him, but in order to make his own

happiness a perfect thing; and if her heart's blood had been needed for

that, it would have been poured out like water. The pale-faced Frarnie--if

question could be of her--might never know such love as that: love with

her could be a sentiment, a lover one who added to her pleasure, but a

sacrifice on her part for that lover would have been something to tell and

sing for ever, if indeed it were possible that such a thing should be made

at all.

So day by day the spell deepened with Louie, and for another week there

was delightful loneliness with this lover of hers--strolls down through

the swampy woods hunting for moss to frame the prints he had brought home

uninjured, and which were to be part of the furnishing of their future

home; others across the salt meadows for the little red samphire stems to

pickle; sails in the float down river and in the creeks, where the tall

thatch parted by the prow rustled almost overhead, and the gulls came

flying and piping around them: here and there, they two alone, pouring out

thought and soul to each other, and every now and then glancing shyly at

those days, that did not seem so very far away, when they should be

sailing together through foreign parts; for Louie's father, the old

fisherman, was all her household, and a maiden aunt, who earned her

livelihood in nursing the sick and attending the dead, would be glad to

come any day and take Louie's place in the cottage.

At the end of the week, Mr. Maurice sent for Andrew to his counting-room;

and after that, on one device or another, he had him there the greater

part of every day, employing him in a score of pleasant ways--asking his

advice as to the repairs of the Sabrina, taking him with him in his chaise

jogging through the shipyard, where a new barque was getting ready for her

launching, examining him the while carefully from time to time after his

wont; at last taking him casually home to dinner with him one day, keeping

him to tea the next, and finally, fully satisfied with the result of his

studies in that edition of human nature, giving him the freedom of the

family as much as if he had been the son of the house.

"I've some plans ahead for you, my boy," said he one day with a knowing

shake of the head; and Andrew's innocent brain began to swim straightway

between the new barque and the Sabrina.

"Look at him!" said Mr. Maurice to his wife one evening as Andrew walked

in the garden with Miss Frarnie. "My mind's made up about him. He's the

stuff for a sea-captain, afraid neither of wind nor weather nor the face

of clay--can sail a ship and choose her cargo. He's none of your coxcombs

that go courting across the way: he's a man into the core of his heart,

and as well bred as any gentleman that walks; though Goodness knows how he

came by it."

"These sea-coast people," said his wife, reflectively (she was inland-born

herself), "see the world and learn."

"Well, what do you say to it? I don't find the flaw in him. If Heaven had

given me a son, I'd have had him be like this one; and since it didn't,

why here's my way to circumvent Heaven."

"Oh, my dear," said the wife, "I can't hear you talk so. And besides--"

"Well? Besides what?"

"I think it is always best to let such things take their own course. We

did."

"Of course we did," laughed Mr. Maurice. "But how about our fathers and

mothers?"

"I mean," said Mrs. Maurice, "not to force things."

"And who intends to force them? It's plain enough the young fellow took a

fancy to our Frarnie the first time he laid eyes on her, isn't it?"

"I mean," said Mrs. Maurice again, "that if Frarnie should have the same

fancy for him, I don't know that there'd be any objection. He is quite

uncommon--quite uncommon when you consider all things--but I don't know

why you want to lead her to like any one in particular, when she has such

a nice home and is all we have."

"Girls will marry, Mrs. Maurice. If it isn't one, it will be another. So I

had rather it should, be one, and that one of my own choosing--one who,

will use her well, and not make ducks and drakes of her money as soon as

we are gone where there's no returning, and without a 'thank you' for your

pains. Look at them now! Should you imagine they thought there was any one

else on earth but each other at this moment? They're fond of each other,

that's plain. They'd be a remarkable-looking couple. What do you think of

it?"

"Frarnie might have that India shawl that I never undid, to appear out

in," said Mrs. Maurice, pensively, continuing her own reflections rather

than directly replying. "And I suppose we needn't lose her really, for she

could make her home with us."

And so the conspiracy advanced, its simple victims undreaming of its

approach--Louie sighing faintly to think she saw so little of Andrew now,

but content, since she was sure it was for his best interest to make the

friendship of the Sabrina's owner; Andrew fretting to see how all this

necessary submission to superiors kept him from Louie, but more than half

compensated with the dazzling visions that danced before his eyes of the

Sabrina in her new rig--of the barque coming down for her masts and sails

from her launching.

The Sabrina had been so badly injured by her disasters that it took much

more time to repair her than had at first been thought. "I'm going to

stand by the old brig," said Andrew to some one--by accident it was in Mr.

Maurice's hearing. "But if I'd known it was going to take so long to have

her whole again, I should have made a penny in taking a run down the bay,

for I had an offer to go second mate on the Tartar."

"I'll go one better than that," said Mr. Maurice then. "Here's the

Frarnie, nearly ready to clear for New Orleans and Liverpool, with your

old captain. You shall go mate of her. That'll show if you can handle a

ship. The Sabrina won't be at the wharf till the round voyage is over and

the Frarnie coming up the stream again. What say you?"

Of course what Andrew said was modest thanks--what he felt was a rhapsody

of delight; and when he told Louie that night, what she said was a sob,

and what she felt was a blank of fright and foreboding. Oh what should she

do? cried the selfish little thing--what should she do in the long, long,

weary days with Andrew gone? But then in a moment she remembered that this

was the first step toward going master of that craft in which her bridal

voyage was to be taken. "And what a long step it is, Andrew!" she cried.

"Was the like of it ever known before? What a long, long step it would be

but for that bitter apprenticeship when you and the captain brought the

wreck home!"

"Ay," said Andrew, proudly: "I served my time before the mast then, if

ever any did."

"And I suppose with the next step you will be master of the Sabrina? Oh, I

should so like it!"

"I don't know," said Andrew, more doubtfully than he had used to speak.

"I'm afraid the owners will think this is enough. This is a great lift.

I'll do my best to satisfy them, though; for I'd rather sail master of the

Sabrina than of the biggest man-of-war afloat."

"We used to play round her when we were children," said Louie,

encouragingly. "Don't you remember leading me down once to admire the lady

on her stern?--like a water-witch just gilded in the rays of some sunrise

she had come up to see, you said."

"Yes; and we used to climb her shrouds, we boys, and get through the

lubber-hole, before we could spell her name out. She's made of heart of

oak: she'll float still when the Frarnie is nothing but sawdust. We used

to watch for her in the newspapers--we used to know just as much about her

goings and comings as the owner did. Somehow--I don't know why--I've

always felt as if my fate and fortune hung upon her. It used to be the top

of my ambition to go master of her. It is now. I couldn't make up my mind

to leave her when the others did that cruel morning after the wreck; and

when the captain said he should stay by her, my heart sprang up as if she

had been a living thing, and I stayed too. And I'd rather sail her than a

European steamer to-day--that I would, by George!"

"Oh, of course you will," said the sympathizing voice beside him.

"I don't know," said Andrew again, more slowly and reflectively. "I've the

idea--and I can't say how I got it--that there's some condition or other

attached to my promotion--that there's something Mr. Maurice means that I

shall do, and if I don't do it I don't get my lift. It can't be anything

about wages: I don't know what it is!"

"Perhaps," said Louie, innocently, and without a glimpse of the train her

thoughtless words fired--"perhaps he means for you to marry Frarnie!"

laughing a little laugh at the absurd impossibility.

And Andrew started as if a bee had stung him, and saw it all. But in a

moment he only drew Louie closer, and kissed her more passionately, and

sat there caressing her the more tenderly while they listened to a thrush

that had built in the garden thicket, mistaking it for the wood, so near

the town's edge was it, and so still and sunny was the garden all day long

with its odors of southernwood and mint and balm; and he delayed there

longer, holding her as if now at least she was his own, whatever she might

be thereafter.

As he walked home that night, and went and sat upon the wharf and watched

the starlit tide come in, he saw it all again, but with thoughts like a

procession of phantoms, as if they had no part even in the possible things

of life, and were indeed nothing to him. How could they have any meaning

to him--to him, Louie's lover? What would the whole world be to him, what

the sailing of the Sabrina, without Louie? And then a shiver ran across

him: what would Louie be to him without the sailing of the Sabrina! for

that, indeed, as he had said, was the top of his ambition, and that being

his ambition, perhaps ambition, was as strong with him as love.

But with this new discovery on Andrew's part of Mr. Maurice's desires,

Andrew could only recall circumstances, words, looks, hints: he could not

shape to himself any line of duty or its consequences: enough to see that

Mr. Maurice fancied his simple and thoughtless attentions to Frarnie to be

lover-like, and, approving him, looked kindly on them and made his plans

accordingly; enough to see that if he should reject this tacit proffer of

the daughter's hand, then the Sabrina was scarcely likely to be his; and

that in spite of such probability, the first and requisite thing in honor

for him to do was to tell Mr. Maurice of his marriage engagement with

Louie, and then, if the man had neither gratitude nor sense enough to

reward him for his assistance in saving the brig, to trust to fortune and

to time, that at last makes all things even. As he sat there listening to

the lapping of the water and idly watching the reflected stars peer up and

shatter in a hundred splinters with every wash of the dark tide, he could

not so instantaneously decide as to whether he should make this confession

or not. "What business is it of Maurice's?" he said to himself. "Does he

think every one that looks at his scarecrow of a daughter--" But there he

had need to acknowledge to himself his injustice to Miss Frarnie, a modest

maiden who had more cause to complain of him than he of her, since he had

done his best to please her, and her only fault lay in being pleased so

easily. She was pleased with him: he understood that now, though his

endeavors to enlist her had been for a very different manifestation of

interest. Perhaps it flattered him a little: he paused long enough to

consider what sort of a lot it would be if he really had been plighted to

Frarnie instead of Louie. Love and all that nonsense, he had heard say,

changed presently into a quiet sort of contentment; and if that were so,

it would be all the same at the end of a few years which one he took. He

felt that Frarnie was not very sympathetic, that her large white face

seldom sparkled with much intelligence, that she would make but a dull

companion; but, for all that, she would be, he knew, an excellent

housewife: she would bring a house with her too; and when a man is

married, and has half a dozen children tumbling round him, there is

entertainment enough for him, and it is another bond between him and the

wife he did not love too well at first; and if she were his, his would be

the Sabrina also, and when the Sabrina's days were over perhaps a great

East Indiaman, and with that the respect and deference of all his

townsmen: court would be paid to him, his words would be words of weight,

he would have a voice in the selection of town-officers, he would roll up

money in the bank, and some day he should be master of the great Maurice

mansion and the gardens and grapehouses. It was a brilliant picture to

him, doubtless, but in some way the recollection of two barelegged little

children digging clams down on the flats when the tide was out, with the

great white lighthouse watching them across the deserted stretches of the

long bent eel-grass, rose suddenly and wiped the other picture out, and he

saw the wind blowing in Louie's brown and silken hair and kissing the

color on her cheeks; he saw the shy sparkle of her downcast eyes, lovely

and brown then as they were now; and as he stood erect at last, snapping

his fingers defiantly, he felt that he had bidden Mr. Maurice's ships and

stocks and houses and daughter go hang, and had made his choice rather to

walk with Louie on his arm than as master of the Sabrina.

It was a good resolution; and if he had but sealed it by speaking next day

to Mr. Maurice of his engagement, there would not have been a word to say.

But, though he valiantly meant to do it, it was not so easy, after all, as

he had thought, and so he put it off for a more convenient season, and the

season did not come, and the day of sailing did. And the outfit that went

on board the Frarnie was made and packed by the hands of Mrs. Maurice and

her daughter--such an outfit as he had never dreamed of; such warm woolens

for the storms, such soft linens for the heats, such finery for port, such

dainties and delicacies as only the first mate of the Frarnie could think

to have. And as for Louie, it was no outfit, no costly gift of gold or

trouble either, that she could give him: she had nothing for him but a

long, fine chain woven of her own hair, and she hung it round his neck

with tears and embraces and words that could not be uttered and sighs that

changed to sobs, and then came lingering delay upon delay, and passionate

parting at the last. But when the crew had weighed anchor and the sails

were swelling and the waves beyond the bar crying out for them, Miss

Frarnie and her mother could still be seen waving their handkerchiefs from

an upper window; and half blind with the sorrow and the pain he choked

away from sight, and mad with shame to think he had found no way but to

accept their favors, Andrew felt that their signal must be answered, and

sullenly waved his own in reply; and then the pilot was leaving the

barque, and presently the shore and all its complications, and Louie

crying herself sick, were forgotten in the excitement of the moment and

its new duties.

"Didn't say a word of love to Frarnie, eh?" remarked Mr. Maurice in answer

to his wife's communications that evening. "A noble lad, then! I like him

all the better for it. He shall have her all the sooner. He won't abuse

our confidence: that's it. He'll wait till he's bridged over the gap

between them. The first mate of a successful voyage is a better match for

my daughter than the boy who stayed by the Sabrina, brave as he was. He's

fond of her? Don't you think so? There's no doubt about that? None at all!

All in good time--all in good time. I'll speak to him myself. They're

going to write to each other? I thought so."

Short as the trip was that the Frarnie made in that favorable season, it

seemed to Louie an interminable period; but from the cheerful, hopeful

smile upon her lips no one would ever have known how her heart was longing

for her lover as she went about her work; for the little housekeeper had

quite too much to do in keeping the cottage clean, the garden weedless,

the nets mended, to be able to neglect one duty for any love-sick fancies

it might be pleasant to indulge. From morning till night her days were

full in bringing happiness to others: there was her father to make

comfortable; there were the sick old women, of whom her aunt brought word,

to concoct some delicacy for--a cup of custard, to wit, a dish of the

water-jelly she had learned how to make from the sea-moss she gathered on

the beach, a broiled and buttered mushroom from the garden; there were the

canaries and the cat to be cared for, and the dog that Andrew left with

her to feed and shower caresses on; and there was the parrot's toilet to

be made and her lesson to be taught, and the single jars of preserves and

pickles and ketchups to be put up for winter, and the herbs to be dried:

there were not, you may see, many minutes to be wasted out of that busy

little life in castle-building or in crying. One day there came a letter

with Victoria's head and the Liverpool stamp upon it: she knew it by heart

presently, and wore it next her heart by night and day; and even if she

had known that Miss Frarnie Maurice received one in the same handwriting

by the same mail, it would hardly have made much difference to her; and

one day the Sabrina, all freshly coppered and painted and repaired, with

new masts and sails, and so much else that it was not easy to say what

part of her now represented the old brig, came round to her old wharf and

began to take in cargo. Louie ran down one evening with her father, and

went all over her from stem to stern, only one old sailor being aboard;

and she could have told you then every rope from clew to ear-ring; and, as

if it were all the realization of a dream, a thousand happy, daring

thoughts of herself and Andrew then filled her fancy like birds in a nest;

and so swiftly after that did one day flow into another for Louie that the

Frarnie lay in the mid-stream once more before she had more than begun to

count the days to that on which her Liverpool letter had promised that she

should see its writer come walking into her father's cottage again.

But she never did see him come walking into her father's cottage again.

That promised day passed and the night, and another--a long, long day that

seemed as if it would never quench its flame in sunset, and a night that

seemed as if it would never know the dawning; but the threshold of the

fisherman's cottage Andrew Traverse crossed no more.

For Mr. Maurice, on his notable errand of circumventing Heaven, had been

ahead of Fate, and had gone down on the pilot-boat to meet the

Frarnie--with no settled designs of course, but in his own impatient

pleasure; and, delighted with the shipmaster's report and with the

financial promise of the voyage, the cargo, the freights, and ventures and

all, had greeted Andrew with a large-hearted warmth and after a manner

that no churl could withstand; and unwilling to listen to any refusal, had

taken Andrew up to the mansion-house with him the moment the ship had

touched the wharf.

"You don't ask after her?" said Mr. Maurice when they were alone in the

chaise together. And knowing well enough what he meant, Andrew blushed

through all his bronze--knowing well enough, for had he not gone below in

a mighty hurry and tricked himself out in his best toggery so soon as he

understood there was no escape from the visit? Louie would have been glad

enough to see him in his red shirt and tarpaulin!

"Oh, you scamp!" said Mr. Maurice, quickly then detecting the blush.

"Don't say a word! I've been there myself: I know how you're longing to

see her; and she's been at the window looking through the glass every half

hour, the puss!"

"Mr. Maurice," began Andrew, half trembling, but wholly resolved, he

thought--although it must be confessed that with time, and distance, and

Frarnie's effusive letters and flattering prospects on the other hand,

Louie's image was not so bright at that moment as it had been at others,

and for that very reason Andrew was taking great credit to himself for his

upright intentions--credit enough to tide him over a good deal of baseness

if need were,--"Mr. Maurice--" he began; and there he paused to frame his

sentence more suitably, for it was no easy thing to tell a man that he was

throwing his child at one who did not care for her, and that man the

disposer of his fortunes.

But Mr. Maurice saved him any such trouble. "I know all you're going to

say," he exclaimed. "I understand your hesitation, and I honor you for it.

But I'm no fool, and there's no need to have you tell me that you want my

Frarnie, for I've known that long ago."

"Mr. Maurice!"

"Yes, I have," answered the impulsive gentleman. "Mrs. Maurice and I

talked it over as soon as we saw which way the wind lay; but of course we

decided to say nothing till we were sure, quite sure, that it was Frarnie

and not her prospects--"

"Oh, sir, you--"

"Tush, tush! I know all about it now. But it becomes a father to be wary,"

continued the other, taking the words from Andrew's lips in spite of

himself, and quite wary enough not to mention that in Frarnie's

easily-excited favor a young scapegrace was very likely to supplant Mr.

Andrew if things were not brought to a point at once. "It was my duty to

look at all sides," he said, without stopping for breath. "Now I know you,

and I see you'd rather give the girl the go-by for ever than have her

think you wanted her because she was her father's daughter, and not some

poor fisherman's."

"Indeed, indeed--" began Andrew again, leaning forward, his cheeks

crimson, his very hands shaking.

"Of course, my boy," interrupted his companion as before--"of course.

Don't say a word: you're welcome to her at last. I never thought I'd

surrender her to any one so freely; but if I were choosing from all the

world, Andrew, I don't know any one I'd choose sooner for my son. She's a

sensible girl, my Frarnie is, at bottom. We know her heart: it's a good

heart--only the froth of all young girls' fancies to be blown off. And the

Sabrina always was a pet of mine, and, though I've said nothing of it,

I've meant her for Frarnie's husband this many a day." And before Andrew,

in his flurry and embarrassment and bewilderment, could enunciate any

distinct denial of anything or avowal of anything else, the chaise was at

the door, and Mrs. Maurice was waiting for him with extended hands, and

Frarnie was standing and smiling behind, half turned to run away. And Mr.

Maurice cried out: "Captain Traverse of the Sabrina, my dear! Here,

Frarnie, Frarnie! none of your airs and graces! Come and give your

sweetheart an honest kiss!" And Andrew, doubting if the minister were not

behind the door and he should not find himself married out of hand,

irresolute, cowardly, too weak to give up the Sabrina and that sweet new

title just ringing in his ears, was pushed along by Mr. Maurice's foolish,

hearty hand till he found himself bending over Frarnie with his arm around

her waist, his lips upon her cheek, and without, as it seemed to him,

either choice or volition on his part. But as he looked up and saw the

portraits of the girl's grandfathers, where they appeared to be looking

down at him stern and questioning, a guilty shame over the wrong he was

doing their child smote him sorely: he saw that he had allowed the one

instant of choice to slip away; the sense came over him that he had sealed

his own doom, while a vision of Louie's face, full of desolation and

horror, was scorching in upon his soul; and there, in the moment of

betrothal, his punishment began. He stole down to the Sabrina's wharf that

evening, after the moon had set, and looking round to see that it was

quite forsaken at that hour, he took from his neck a long, slender

hair-chain to drop over into the deep water there; but as he held the

thing it seemed suddenly to coil round his hand with a caress, as if it

were still a part of Louie's self. He stamped his foot and ground his heel

into the earth there with a cry and an oath, and put the chain back again

whence he had taken it, and swore he would wear it till they laid his

bones under ground. And he looked up at the dark lines of the brig looming

like the black skeleton of an evil thing against the darkness of the

night, and he cursed himself for a traitor to both women--for a hypocrite,

a craven, a man sold to the highest bidder. Well, well, Captain Traverse,

there are curses that cling! And Louie sat in the gloom at the window of

the fisherman's cottage down below the town, and sighed and wondered and

longed and waited, but Captain Traverse went back to the Maurices'

mansion.

* * * * *

It is one of the enigmas of this existence how women forgive the wrong of

such hours as came to Louie now--hours of suspense and suffering--hours of

a misery worse than the worm's misery in blindness and pain before it

finds its wings.

At first she expected her lover, and speculated as to his delay, and

fretted to think anything might detain him from her; and now she was

amazed, and now vexed, and now she was forgiving the neglect, accusing

herself and making countless excuses for him; and now imagining a thousand

dire mishaps. But as the third day came and he was still away--he who had

been always wont to seek her as soon as the craft was made fast to

wharf--then she felt her worst forebodings taking bodily shape: he was

ill, he had fallen overboard, he had left the vessel at Liverpool and

shipped upon another, and a letter would come directly to say so; or else

he had been waylaid and robbed and made away with: not once did she dream

that he was false to her--to her, a portion of his own life!

How it was with him there were numberless ways in which she might have

discovered, for every soul of her acquaintance knew Andrew, and must be

aware of the fact if he were missing or ailing, or if any other ill chance

had befallen him. But as often as she tried to address one or another

passing by the window, her voice failed her and her heart, and she asked

no questions, and only waited on. A life of suspense, exclaims some one, a

life of a spider! And when we are in suspense, says another, all our aids

are in suspense with us. Day after day she stayed continually in the

house, looking for him to come, never stirring out even into the garden,

lest coming she might miss him. Night after night she sat alone at her

window till the distant town-clocks struck midnight--now picturing to

herself the glad minute of his coming, the quick explaining words, the

bursting tears of relief, the joy of that warm embrace, the touch of those

strong arms--now convinced that he would never come, and her heart sinking

into a bitter loneliness of despair.

It grew worse with her when she knew that he was really in the town, alive

and well; for, from the scuttle in the roof, by the aid of her father's

glass, she could see the Sabrina, and one day she was sure that a form

whose familiar outlines made her pulses leap was Andrew himself giving

orders on the deck there; and after that she tortured herself with

conjectures till her brain was wild--chained hand and foot, unable to

write him or to seek him in any maidenly modesty, heart and soul in a

ferment. Still she waited in that shuddering suspense, with every nerve so

tightly strung, that voice or footfall vibrated on them into pain. If

Andrew, in the midst of the gayeties by which he found himself accepted of

the Maurices' friends, was never haunted by any thought of all this, his

heart had grown stouter in one year's time than twenty years had found and

left it previously.

But Louie's suspense was of no long duration, as time goes, though to her

it was a lifetime. A week covered it--a week full of stings and fevered

restlessness--when her father came in one day and said bitterly, thinking

it best to make an end of all at once: "So I hear that a friend of ours

has been paid off at last. Captain Andrew Traverse of the Sabrina is going

to marry his owner's daughter Frarnie. Luck will take passage on that

brig!" And when Louie rose from the bed on which she lay down that night,

the Sabrina had been a fortnight gone on her long voyage--a voyage where

the captain had sailed alone, postponing the evil day perhaps, and at any

rate pleading too much inexperience, for all his dazzling promotion, to be

trusted with so precious thing as a wife on board during the first trip.

He had not felt that hesitation once when portraying the possibilities of

the voyage to another.

It was not a long illness, Louie's, though it had been severe enough to

destroy for her consciousness both of pain and pleasure. Her aunt had left

other work and had nursed her through it; but when, strong and well once

more, she went about her old duties, it seemed to her that that

consciousness had never returned: she took up life with utter listlessness

and indifference, and she fancied that her love for Andrew was as dead as

all the rest. The poor little thing, laying this flattering unction to

heart, did not call much reason to her aid, or she would have known that

there was some meaning in it when she cried all day on coming across an

old daguerreotype of Andrew. "It isn't for love of him," she sobbed. "It's

for the loss of all that love out of my life that was heaven to me. Oh no,

no! I love him no longer: I can't, I can't love him: he is all the same as

another woman's husband." But, despite this stout assertion, she could not

bring herself to part with that picture: he was not in reality quite the

husband of another woman, and till he was indeed she meant to keep it. "He

is only promised to her yet, and he was promised first to me," she said

for salve to conscience; and meanwhile the picture grew so blurred with

conscious tears, and perhaps with unconscious kisses, that it might have

been his or another's: Miss Frarnie herself, had she seen it, could not

have told whose it was.

Notwithstanding all the elasticity of youth, life became an inexpressibly

dull thing to Louie as the year wore into the next--dull, with neither aim

nor object, the past a pain to remember, the future a blank to consider.

She could live only from day to day, one day like another, till they grew

so wearisome she wondered her hair was not gray--the pretty hair that,

shorn from her head in her illness, had grown again in a short fleece of

silky curls--for it seemed to her that she had lived a hundred years. And

because troubles never come alone, and one perhaps makes the other seem

lighter and better to be borne, in the thick of a long winter's storm they

brought home her father, the old fisherman, drowned and dead.

Captain Traverse knew of the old fisherman's death through the newspapers

that found him in his foreign ports--not through Miss Frarnie's letters,

for she knew almost nothing of the existence or non-existence of such low

people; and therefore, conjecture as he needs must concerning Louie's

means of livelihood now, there was no intelligence to relieve any anxiety

he might have felt, or to inform him of the sale of the cottage to pay the

debt of the mortgage under which it was bought, or of the support that

Louie earned in helping her aunt watch with the sick and lay out the dead:

he could only be pricked with knowledge of the fact that he had no right

to his anxiety, or to the mention of her name even in his prayers--if he

said them.

Poor little Louie! A sad end to such a joyous youth as hers had been, you

would have said; but, in truth, her new work was soothing to her: her

heart was simply in harmony with suffering, with death and desolation, and

by degrees she found that comfort from her double sorrows in doing her

best to bring comfort to others which it may be she could never have found

had she been the pampered darling of some wealthy house. Often, when she

forgot what she was doing, Louie made surmises concerning Frarnie Maurice,

wondering if she were the noble thing that Andrew needed to ennoble

him--if she were really so strong and beautiful that the mere sight of her

had killed all thought or memory of an older love; trying to believe her

all that his guardian angel might wish his wife to be, and to acknowledge

that she herself was so low and small and ignorant that she could only

have injured him--to be convinced that it was neither weakness, nor

covetousness, nor perjury in Andrew, having met the sun, to forget the

shadows; wondering then if Frarnie cared for him as she herself had done,

and crying out aloud that that could never be, until the sound of her own

sobs woke her from her forbidden dream. But at other times a calm came to

Louie that was more pathetic than her wildest grief: it was the

acquiescence in what Providence had chosen for Andrew, cost herself what

it might--it was the submission of the atom beneath the wheels of the

great engine.

It is true that as, late in the night, when all the town was asleep and

only silence and she abroad, she walked home by herself from some deathbed

whose occupant she had composed decently for the last sleep, she used to

wish it were herself lying there on that moveless pillow, and soon to be

sheltered from the cruel light by the bosom of the kindly earth. For now,

as she passed the birches softly rustling in the night wind, and hurried

by, she remembered other times when she had passed them, and had stopped

to listen, cared for, protected, with Andrew's arm about her; and now, as

the clocks, one after another, remotely chimed the hour, the sound smote

her with a familiar sweetness full of pain; and now, as she came along the

sea-wall and saw the dark river glimmering widely and ever the same, while

its mysterious tide flowed to meet the far-off spark of the lighthouse

lantern, she recalled a hundred happy hours when she and Andrew in the

boat together had rocked there in soft summer nights, with sunset melting

in the stream and wrapping them about with rosy twilight; or those when

whispers of the September gales swelled the sail, and the boat flew like a

gull from crest to crest of the bar; or those when misty sea-turns crept

up stream and folded them, and drowned the sparkle of the lighthouse and

the emerald and ruby ray of the channel lights, and left them shut away

from the world, alone with each other on the great gray current silently

sweeping to the sea--times when she knew no fear, trusting in the strong

arm and stout heart beside her, before the river had brought death to her

door; when the whole of life seemed radiant and rich--times that made this

solitary night walk trodden now seem colder and drearier and darker than

the grave--that made her wish it ended in a grave.

And so at length the year slipped by, and spring had come again, and the

sap had leaped up the bough and burst into blossom there, and the blood

had bubbled freshly in the veins of youth, and hope had once more

gladdened all the world but Louie. With her only a dull patience stayed

that tried to call itself content, until she heard it rumored among the

harbor-people that the Sabrina was nearly due again, and with that her

heart beat so turbulently that she had to crush it down again with the

thought that, though Andrew every day drew nearer, came up the happy

climates of southern latitudes and spread his sails on favoring gales for

home, he only hastened to his wedding-day. And one day, at last, she rose

to see a craft anchored in the middle channel down below the piers,

unpainted and uncleaned by any crew eager to show their best to shore--a

black and blistered brig, with furled sails and silent deck; and some men

called it the fever-ship, and some men called it the Sabrina.

As the news of the brig's return and of her terrible companion spread

through the town, a panic followed it, and the feeling with which she was

regarded all along the shore during that day and the next would hardly be

believed by any but those who have once been in the neighborhood of a

pestilence themselves. Exaggerated accounts of a swift, strange illness,

by many believed to be the ancient plague revived again and cast loose

through the land from Asiatic ships had reached the old port; and aware

that they were peculiarly exposed by reason of their trade, small as it

was, the people there had already died a thousand deaths through

expectation of the present coming of the fever already raging in other

parts. Hitherto, the health-officers, boarding everything that appeared,

had found no occasion to give anything but clean papers, and the town had

breathed again. But now, when at last it spread from lip to lip that the

fever lay at anchor in mid-channel, knees shook and cheeks grew white, and

health-officer and port-physician, in spite of the almost instantaneous

brevity of their visit to the infected vessel, were avoided as though they

were the pestilence themselves, and not a soul in all the town was found

to carry a cup of cold water to the gasping, burning men cared for only by

those in less desperate strait than themselves, and who, having buried

two-thirds of their number in deep-sea soundings, were likely to be denied

as much as a grave on shore themselves; while to Mr. Maurice, half wild

with perplexity and foreboding and amazement at Miss Frarnie's yet wilder

terror,--to him the red lantern hung out by the brig at nightfall

magnified itself in the mist into a crimson cloud where with wide wings

lurked the very demon of Fever himself.

Not a soul to carry the cup of cold water, did I say? Yes, one timid

little soul there was, waiting in a fever of longing herself--waiting that

those who had a right to go might do so if they would--waiting till

assured that neither Frarnie Maurice nor her parents had the first

intention of going, though affianced husband and chosen son lay dying

there--waiting in agony of impatience, since every delay might possibly

mean death,--one little brave and timid soul there was who ventured forth

on her errand of mercy alone. The fisherman's old boat still lay rocking

in the cove, and the oars stood in the shed: Louie knew how to use them

well, and making her preparations by daylight, and leaving the rest till

nightfall, lest she should be hindered by the authorities, she found means

to impress the little cow-boy into her service; and after dark a keg of

sweet water was trundled down and stored amidships of the boat, with an

enormous block of ice rolled in an old blanket; a basket of lemons and

oranges was added, a roll of fresh bed-linen, a little box of such

medicines as her last year's practice had taught her might be of use; and

extorting a promise from the boy that he would leave another block of ice

on the bank every night after dark for her to come and fetch, Louie

quickly stepped into the boat, lifted the oars, and slipt away into the

darkness of the great and quiet river.

When, three days afterward, Captain Traverse unclosed his eyes from a

dream of Gehenna and the place the smoke of whose torment goes up for

ever, a strange confusion crept like a haze across his mind, tired out and

tortured with delirium, and he dropped the aching lids and fell away into

slumber again; for he had thought himself vexed with the creak of cordage

and noise of feet, stived in his dark and narrow cabin, on a filthy bed in

a foul air, if any air at all were in that noisome place, reeking with

heat and the ferment of bilge-water and fever-smell; and here, unless a

new delirium chained him, a mattress lay upon the deck with the awning of

an old sail stretched above it and making soft shadow out of searching

sun, a gentle wind was blowing over him, a land-breeze full of sweet

scents from the gardens on the shore, from the meadows and the marshes.

Silence broken only by a soft wash of water surrounded him; a flake of ice

lay between his lips, that had lately been parched and withering, and

delicious coolness swathed his head, that had seemed to be a ball of

burning fire. The last that he remembered had been a hot, dry, aching

agony, and this was bliss: the sleep into which he fell when waking from

the stupor that had benumbed his power of suffering--a power that had

rioted till no more could be suffered--lasted during all the spell of that

fervid noon sun that hung above the harbor and the town like the unbroken

seal of the expected pestilence. A strange still town, fear and heat

keeping its streets deserted, its people longing for an east wind that

should kill the fever, yet dreading lest it should blow the fever in on

them; a strange still harbor, its great peaceful river darkened only by

that blot where the sun-soaked craft swung at her anchor; a strange still

craft, where nothing stirred but one slender form, one little being that

went about laying wet cloths upon this rude sailor's head, broken ice

between the lips of that one, moistening dry palms, measuring out cooling

draughts, and only resting now and then to watch one sleeper sleep, to

hang and hear if in that deep dream there were any breathing and it were

not the last sleep of all. And in Louie's heart there was something just

as strange and still as in all other things throughout that wearing,

blinding day; but with her the calm was not of fear, only of unspeakable

joy; for if Andrew lived it was she that had saved him, and though he

died, his delirium had told her that his heart was hers. "If he dies, he

is mine!" she cried triumphantly, forgetting all the long struggle of

scruple and doubt, "and if he lives, he shall never be hers!" she cried

softly and with that inner voice that no one hears.

And so the heat slipped down with the sun to other horizons, coolness

crept in upon the running river's breast with the dusk, dew gathered and

lay darkly glittering on rail and spar and shroud as star by star stole

out to sparkle in it; and Andrew raised his eyes at length, and they

rested long and unwaveringly on the little figure sitting not far away

with hands crossed about the knees and eyes looking out into the last

light--the tranquil, happy face from which a white handkerchief kept back

the flying hair while giving it the likeness of a nun's. Was it a dream?

Was it Louie? Or was it only some one of the tormenting phantoms that for

so many burning days had haunted him? He tried in vain to ask: his tongue

clove to the roof of his mouth; he seemed to be in the power of one of

those fierce nightmares where life depends on a word and the word is not

to be spoken. Only a vision, then: he closed his lids thinking it would be

gone when he lifted them, but he did not want it to be gone, and looked

again to find it as before. And by and by it seemed to him that long

since, in a far-off dream, he had gathered strength and uttered the one

thought of his fever, "Louie, what do you do now?" and she had answered

him, as though she thought aloud, "I stroke the dead;" and he had cried

out, "Then presently me too, me too! And let the shroud be shotted heavily

to bury me out of your sight!" And he was crying it out again, but while

he spoke a mouth was laid on his--a warm, sweet mouth that seemed to

breathe fresh spirit through his frame--his head was lifted and pillowed

on a breast where he could hear the heart beneath flutter like a happy

bird, and he was wrapped once more in slumber, but this time slumber sweet

as it was deep.

Morning was dawning over the vessel's side, a dream of rosy lustre sifting

through the purple and pearly mist, behind which the stars grew large and

lost while it moved away to the west in one great cloud, and out of which

the river gleamed as if just newly rolled from its everlasting

fountains,--morning was dawning with the sweet freshness of its fragrant

airs stealing from warm low fields, when Andrew once more lifted his eyes

only to find that tranquil face above him still, that happy heart still

beating beneath his pillowed head. "Oh, Louie," he sighed, "speak to

me--say--have I died?--am I forgiven?--is this heaven?"

"To me, dear--oh to me!" answered she with the old radiant smile that used

to make his pulse quicken, and that, ill as he yet was, reassured him as

to his earthly latitude and longitude.

"And it was all a dream, then?" he murmured. "And I have not lost you?" He

raised his wasted hand and drew from his breast the little hair chain that

he had hidden there so long ago. "It was a fetter I could not break," he

whispered. "I wrote her all about it long ago. I wrote her father that he

should have his vessel back again--and I would take my freedom--and not a

dollar's wages for the voyage would I ever draw of him. But I should never

have dared see you--for--oh, Louie--how can you ever--"

"Hush, hush, dear!" she breathed. "What odds is all that now? We have our

life before us."

"Only just help me live it, Louie."

"God will help us," she answered. And as she spoke a sudden rainbow leaped

into the western heaven as if to seal her promise, and as it slowly faded

there came a wild salt smell, an air that tingled like a tonic through the

veins: the east wind was singing in from sea, bringing the music of

breaker and shore, and the fever was blasted by its breath throughout the

little Sabrina.

HARRIET PRESCOTT SPOFFORD.

Old Sadler's Resurrection:

A Yarn of the Mexican Gulf.

"Talking about ghosts," said the captain, "listen while I spin you a bit

of a yarn which dates back some twenty-five years ago, when, but a wee bit

of a midshipman, I was the youngster of the starboard steerage mess on

board the old frigate Macedonian, then flag-ship of the West India

squadron, and bearing the broad pennant of Commodore Jesse Wilkinson.

"It would hardly interest you to tell what a clever set of lieutenants and

ward-room officers we had, and how the twenty-three reefers in the two

steerage messes kept up a racket and a row all the time, in spite of the

taut rein which the first lieutenant, Mr. Bispham, kept over us. He wore

gold-rimmed spectacles; and I can see him now, with the flat

eagle-and-anchor buttons shining on his blue coat, as he would pace the

quarter-deck, eyeing us young gentlemen of the watch, as demurely we

planked up and down the lee side, tired enough, and waiting for eight

bells to strike to rush below and call our relief. He was an austere man,

and, unlike the brave old commodore, made no allowance for our pranks and

skylarking.

"Among our crew, made up of some really splendid fellows, but with an odd

mixture of 'Mahonese,' 'Dagos,' 'Rock-Scorpions,' and other countrymen,

there was an old man-of-war's man named Sadler--a little, dried-up old

chap of some sixty years, who had fought under Nelson at Trafalgar, so he

said, and had been up and down, all around and criss-cross the world so

often that he had actually forgotten where he had been, and so had all his

geography lessons, learned by cruising experience, sadly mixed up in his

head; which, although small, with a little old, weazened frontispiece, was

full of odds and ends of yarns, with which he used to delight us young

aspirants for naval honors, as he would spin them to us on the booms on

moonlight nights, after the hammocks had been piped down. How well do I

remember the old fellow's appearance!--his neat white frock and trowsers,

his low-quarter purser's shoes, with a bit of a ribbon for a bow; no

socks, save the natural, flesh-tinted ones, a blue star, done in India

ink, gleaming on his instep; his broad blue collar, decorated with stars

and two rows of white tape, falling gracefully from a neck which, as we

youngsters asserted, had received its odd-looking twist from hanging too

long by a grape vine, with which the Isle of Pines' pirates had strung him

up when he was chasing them under old Commodore Kearney's command. Anyhow,

old, sharp-faced, wrinkled and tanned to the color of a sole-leather

trunk, the whole cut of his jib told you at once that he was a regular

man-of-war's man--one of a class whose faults I can hardly recall while

remembering their sense of duty, their utter disregard of danger, and the

reliance with which you can lead them on to attack anything, from a

hornet's nest to an iron-clad.

"Well, it so happened, one hot day, while cruising in the Gulf of Mexico,

that the news came to us that old Sadler was dead; and sure enough it was

so, for the old fellow had quietly slipped his moorings, and, as we all

hoped, had at last gone to where the sweet little cherub sits up aloft who

looks out for the soul of poor Jack. Then, after the doctors had had a shy

at him, to see why he had cleared out so suddenly, his remains were taken

in charge by his messmates, who rigged the old man out in his muster

clothes, sewed him up in his clean white hammock, with an eighteen pound

shot at his feet, and reported to the officer of the deck that the body

was ready for burial. So, about six bells in the afternoon watch, the

weather being very hot, and not a breath of air to ripple the glassy

surface of the water, the lieutenant of the watch directed one of the

young gentlemen to tell the boatswain to call 'All hands to bury the

dead;' and soon fore and aft the shrill whistles were heard, followed by

that saddest of all calls to a sailor at sea--'All hands bury the dead!'

"Our good old boatswain, Wilmuth, seemed to linger on the words with a

feeling akin to grief at parting with an old shipmate, and as the last man

reached the deck, he touched his hat and in a sad sort of way reported,

'All up, sir,' to the first lieutenant, who in his turn reported,

'Officers and men all on deck, sir,' to the commodore, who thereupon gave

an order to the chaplain to go on with the services.

"The courses were hauled up, main-topsail to the mast, band on the

quarter-deck, colors half-mast, and all hands, officers and men, stood

uncovered, looking silently and sadly upon the body as it lay upon the

gang-boards in its white hammock, ready for the last rites. Solemnly and

most impressively were the services read, and at the words, 'We commit his

body to the deep,' a heavy splash was heard, and poor old Sadler had gone

to his long home for ever. Some of us youngsters ran up in the lee main

rigging to see him go down, and as we watched him go glimmering and

glimmering down to a mere speck, we wondered where he was bound, and how

long it would take him to fetch Davy Jones' locker on that tack.

"'Pipe down, sir,' says the commodore to Mr. Bispham; 'Pipe down, sir,'

says Mr. Bispham to Mr. Alphabetical Gray, who was officer of the deck;

'Pipe down, sir,' says Mr. Gray to the gentleman of the watch; 'Pipe down,

sir,' says this youngster to the boatswain; and then _such_ a twitter of

pipes followed this order, and all hands were piped down, while poor old

Sadler was still off soundings, and going down as fast as the

eighteen-pound shot would take him.

"Now, you know that people coming from a funeral on shore always have a

gay sort of air, suppressed it may be, but still cropping out; and just so

is it with sailors at sea; for, Sadler's body committed to the deep, all

hands felt better: the fore and main tacks were hauled aboard, the main

yard was filled away, and the jib sheet hauled aft, and we all settled

down into every-day life, which, after all, is not half so monotonous on

board a man-of-war as you might suppose.

"Well, as I have said, the weather was very hot, the surface of the water

was as smooth as a mill-pond, the wind was all up and down the mast, and

so the old ship was boxing the compass all to herself, and not making a

foot of headway.

"At one bell in the first dog watch, Boyle, the ship's cook, reported the

tea-water ready, and after this came the inevitable evening-quarters--and

some old man-of-war's men would think the country was going to 'Jemmy

Square-toes' stern first if they didn't have quarters--then down hammocks

for the night at six bells, and after that just as much of fun, frolic,

dance, song and yarn spinning as all hands wanted until eight bells, when

the watch was called.

"John Moffitt, the sailing master, the best fellow in the ward-room mess,

and a great favorite with the youngsters, was officer of the deck from six

to eight o'clock; and my messmate, Perry Buckner, of Scott county,

Kentucky, the most dare-devil midshipman of us all, was master's mate of

the forecastle; Hammond, Marshall, Smith and I were the gentlemen of the

Watch; Rodney Barlow was quartermaster at the 'con;' the lookouts had just

been stationed; the men were singing, dancing, spinning yarns and

otherwise amusing themselves about the decks, while the old ship was

turning lazily around in the splendid moonlight as if admiring herself.

"Discipline, you know, is the very life of a man-of-war, and this must

account for what now took place. Tom Edwards, a young foretopman, had the

lee lookout, and as seven bells struck he sang out, 'Lee cat-head;' but

the last syllable died away on his lips as his eyes rested upon an

object--a white object--standing bolt upright in the water before him,

about a hundred yards distant and broad off on the lee bow. Suppressing a

strong desire to shriek, and recovering himself, he touched his hat and

said, 'Mr. Buckner, will you step up here, sir, if you please?'

"'What is she, Edwards?' said Buckner, as he quickly mounted the

hammock-rail.

"One look, a dip down, a shiver, and, O Lord! what did he see but _old

Sadler standing straight as a ramrod, and heading right for the ship!_

"It took Buck a full minute to recover himself, and then, with one eye on

the lee bow and the other on the quarter-deck, he walked aft and

deliberately touching his cap, reported to Moffitt, 'Old Sadler broad off

on the lee bow, sir.'

"'The d---- he is!' exclaimed Moffitt; but, checking himself, he said,

'Mr. Hammond, report Sadler's arrival to the commodore; and you, Mr.

M----, report it to the first lieutenant, sir.'

"My eyes were as big as saucers as I rushed down the steerage ladder and

into the ward-room, where I found the first lieutenant quietly seated

reading over the black list; and when, with my heart in my throat, I said,

'Mr. Bispham, old Sadler is on the lee bow, sir,' he serenely replied,

'Very well, Mr. M---- I'll be on deck directly.'

"'O Lord!' said I to myself--'to take a ghost as easily as all that!'

Bolting up the ladder on my way back to the deck, and trembling lest I

should see the ghost popping his head in through one of the gun-deck

ports, I ran into Hammond, who dodged me like a shot.

"When I got on deck the news was all out, for Tom Edwards couldn't stand

it any longer, but had just yelled out, 'Ghost ho! ghost ho! Look out!

stand from under! here he comes!' and bolted aft, scared out of his wits.

"In ten seconds all hands were on deck--ship's cook, yeoman, 'Jemmy Legs,'

'Jemmy Ducks,' 'Bungs,' Loblolly boy,' captain of the hold, and, by this

time, all the officers too, with the midshipmen scuttling up the ladders

as fast as their legs and hands could carry them.

"Moffitt had hauled up the courses and squared the main yard, as much to

make a diversion as anything else, although the men thought it was to keep

old Sadler from boarding us; and as they rushed up on deck they filled the

booms; lee rigging, hammock--netting and every available spot from which a

sight of the old fellow could be had.

"Very soon they saw that he was not approaching the ship: the old sinner

was just turning and turning around in the water, like a fishing-cork,

dancing away all to himself, while the moonlight, first on one side, and

then on the other, in light and shadow, gave a queer sort of look to his

features, sometimes sad and sometimes funny.

"After watching him for a few minutes, Bill Ellis, the second captain of

the foretop, hailed him thus: 'Sadler, ahoy! What do you want?'

"No answer being received, one of the mizzentop boys suggested that the

old man had come back for his bag and hammock, and that they ought to be

thrown overboard to him; but all this was cut short by the appearance of

the commodore on the quarter-deck, and upon him all eyes were turned as he

stepped upon the port horseblock, where a good view could be had.

"Now, old Jess was as brave an old fellow as ever sailed a ship, but he

did not fancy ghosts, and the knowledge that all hands were looking at him

to see how he took it made him feel a little nervous; but with a firm

voice he called for his night-glass, and when the quartermaster, with a

touch of his hat, handed it to him, he quietly arranged the focus, and, as

we all supposed, was about to point it at Sadler, who was still dancing

away for dear life all to himself. But old Jess was too smart for that: he

quietly directed his glass to another quarter, to gain a little time, and,

gradually sweeping the horizon, brought it at last, with a tremor of

mortal dread, to bear dead upon the ghost. Bless my soul! how the old

gentleman shook! But recovering himself, with a big gulp in his throat he

turned to the chaplain and said, 'Did you read the _full_ service over him

to-day, Mr. T----?'

"'I did, sir, as well as I can remember,' replied Mr. T.

"'Then, sir,' said the commodore, turning to Mr. Bispham and speaking in

an authoritative tone, 'we must send a boat and bring him on board.'

"'O Lord! O Lord!--bring a ghost on board!' groaned the men.

"'Silence, fore and aft!' said Mr. Bispham, 'and call away the second

cutter.'

"'Away there, you second cutters, away!' sung out the boatswain's mate.

But they didn't 'away' one step, and we youngsters could hear the men

growling out, 'What does the commodore want with old Sadler? This isn't

his place: let the old man rip: he is dead and buried all right. We didn't

ship to go cruising after ghosts: we shipped to reef topsails and work the

big guns; and if old Jess wants old Sadler on board, he had better go

after him himself.' Some said he had come back after his bag and hammock,

and the best way was to let him have them, and then he would top his boom

and clear out. Others said the purser had not squared off his account; and

one of the afterguard was seen to tickle the mainmast and whistle for a

breeze, to give the old fellow a wide berth. But it wouldn't do:

discipline is discipline; and after a free use of the colt and a good deal

of hazing, the boat's crew came aft, the cutter was lowered, and the men,

with their oars up and eyes upon the ghost, were waiting the order to

shove off, the bow oarsman having provided himself with a boarding-pike to

'fend off,' as he said, if the old man should fight.

"We youngsters knew that _somebody_ else was needed in that boat, and that

_somebody_ was a midshipman with his side-arms; but not a boy of us said a

word about it, and we were afraid even to catch the first lieutenant's

eye, lest he should be reminded that no young officer had, as usual, been

ordered to go; but the order came at last. When Moffitt asked the first

lieutenant, 'What officer, sir, shall I send in that boat?' we scattered

like a flock of birds, but all too late; for Mr. Bispham referred the

matter to the commodore, who, with a twinkle in his eye, said, 'Who

discovered the ghost, sir?'

"'Midshipman Buckner reported him, sir,' was the reply.

"'Then,' said the commodore, 'by priority of discovery he belongs to Mr.

Buckner, who will take charge of the cutter and bring him on board.'

"I heard all this from my place behind the mizzen mast, and you may guess

how glad I was not to have been selected; but a groan, a chattering of the

teeth, a trembling and shaking of bones close by my side, caused me to

look around, and there was poor Buck, with his priority honors thick upon

him.

"'Get your side-arms, sir,' said Moffitt: 'take charge of the cutter and

carry out the commodore's order.'

"'Ay, ay, sir!' said Buck, but oh with what a change in his voice! As he

buckled on his sword I could see what a struggle he was making to feel

brave. As he went over the gangway to get into the boat I caught his eye,

and if you could have seen that forlorn look you would have pitied him;

for there was old Sadler turning and turning in the water, looking first

this way, and then the other, and, as Buck thought, just ready to hook on

to him and carry him down among the dead men.

"It is no light matter to go up to a ghost, front face, full face, and

look him in the eye; but what must it be when you have to go up to him

_backward_, as that cutter's crew had to do while pulling their oars,

leaving only Buck and the cox-swain to face him? They just couldn't do it,

and at every stroke they would suddenly slew around on their thwarts and

look at the old fellow, who seemed to them as big as an elephant, and just

ready to clap on to them, boat and all, as soon as they turned to give

another stroke. Poor fellows! they made but little headway, and what with

catching crabs, fouling their oars, blasting old Sadler's eyes, and

denouncing him generally (one fellow fairly yelled outright when the bow

oarsman accidentally touched him), they had a hard pull of it; but still

they made some progress, and when Buck sang out, 'Way enough,' every oar

flew inboard, every man faced suddenly around, and with this the cutter

keeled over, and, her bow touching old Sadler on his shoulder, ducked him

out of sight for a second, at which all hands shouted, thinking that he

had gone for ever; but in a moment more up he popped, fresh as a lark,

higher than ever before, and this time right abreast of the stern-sheets,

where he bobbed and bowed to Buck, at which, with a yell of terror, all

hands went overboard, and, floundering in the water, begged for mercy. The

cutter had some little headway, and this of course brought Sadler astern

on the other quarter, and then there was a wild rush to get back into the

boat, for fear the old fellow was doubling on them to make a grab.

"The commodore, hearing the row and fearing disaster, ordered another boat

to the rescue, but ere it reached the spot, Buck had, in some manner,

quieted his men, who, seeing the ghost still standing bolt upright in the

water and dancing away as if nothing had happened to scare _him_, manned

their oars again and pulled cautiously toward him; while he, with that

changeable moonlight grin on his face, was bobbing up and down to the

boat's crew, as if Buck were the commodore himself coming to pay him a

visit.

"'Stand by, there in the bow, to hook on to him,' sang out Buck.

"'Ay, ay, sir! I'll fix him;' and with that, and a heavy expletive in

regard to the old fellow's eyes, the bow oarsman slammed his boarding-pike

right into the ghost, just abaft his left leg, and as the sharp steel

touched the body, a whizzing sound, like the escape of steam, was heard,

and without a word old Sadler vanished from sight for ever."

"But, captain, tell us what really brought the old gentleman back," said

one of the auditors.

"Well, just think of that tight white hammock, the light weight of the

shot, and the very hot weather--think, too, how easily a fishing-cork is

balanced in the water by a very small sinker, and lastly how confined air

will buoy up anything--and you have the whole secret of his coming back.

Let that air suddenly escape, and you have the secret of his

disappearance.

"Buck used to say that 'priority of discovery' was a good thing in the

days of Columbus, but if it was to be continued in force in the United

States navy, hang him if he should ever report another ghost, even if he

should see him walking the quarter-deck with the speaking-trumpet under

his arm."

R. D. MINOR.

End of Project Gutenberg's Not Pretty, But Precious, by John Hay, et al.