I thought I felt a hand wrapping something around me in the night, and I
made to sit up, but a voice said, "Lie down, boy," and I lay down and
went to asleep again.
When I awoke it was to the voices of strange men, and one was saying:
"He will be all right now."
I sat up. I was still in the dory, and saw men standing over me; and
other men were looking down from a vessel's side. Ice was thick on the
rail of the vessel.
It was piercing cold and I was weak with the fire of the pains running
through my veins, but remembering, I tried to stand up.
"Hsh-h, boy!" they said, "you are all right," and would have held me
down while they rubbed my feet and hands.
I stood up among them, nevertheless, and looked for Hugh Glynn. He was
on the after thwart, his arms folded over the gunnel and his forehead
resting on his arms. His woollen shirt was gone from him. I looked back
and in the waist of the dory I saw it, where they had taken it off me;
and the sail of the boat he had wrapped around me, too; and his woollen
mitts.
I lifted his head to see his face. If ever a man smiled, 'twas he was
smiling as I looked. "Skipper! O skipper!" I called out; and again: "O
skipper!"
One of the men who had been rubbing my feet touched my shoulder. "Come
away, boy; the voice o' God called him afore you."
* * * * *
And so Hugh Glynn came to his green grave ashore; and so I came home to
marry Mary Snow; and in the end to father the children which may or may
not grow great as he predicted. But great in the eyes of the world they
could become, greater than all living men, it might be, and yet fall far
short in our eyes of the stature of the man who thought that 'twas
better for one to live than for two to die, and that one not to be
himself.
Desperate he was and lawbreaking, for law is law, whosoever it bears
hard upon; but the heart was warm within him. And if my children have
naught else, and it is for their mother and me to say, the heart to feel
for others they shall have; and having that, the rest may follow or not,
as it will; which would be Hugh Glynn's way of it, too, I think.
* * * * *