CHAPTER XII. IN THE ICE.
“Help! help!” shouted the four trip-hammers,
bursting in like a magnified echo of the boy's last
word. “Help! help!” all the humming wheels
and drums repeated more plaintively.
Wade made for the river.
This was the moment all his manhood had been
training and saving for. For this he had kept
sound and brave from his youth up.
As he ran, he felt that the only chance of instant
help was in that queer little bowl-shaped skiff of
the “Ambuster.”
He had never been conscious that he had observed
it; but the image had lain latent in his mind,
biding its time. It might be ten, twenty precious
moments before another boat could be found. This
one was on the spot to do its duty at once.
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“Somebody carried off, — perhaps a woman,”
Wade thought. “Not — No, she would not neglect
my warning! Whoever it is, we must save
her from this dreadful death!”
He sprang on board the little steamboat. She
was swaying uneasily at her moorings, as the ice
crowded along and hammered against her stem.
Wade stared from her deck down the river, with all
his life at his eyes.
More than a mile away, below the hemlock-crested
point, was the dark object Perry had seen,
still stirring along the edges of the floating ice. A
broad avenue of leaden-green water wrinkled by
the cold wind separated the field where this figure
was moving from the shore. Dark object and its
footing of gray ice were drifting deliberately farther
and farther away.
For one instant Wade thought that the terrible
dread in his heart would paralyze him. But in that
one moment, while his blood stopped flowing and
his nerves failed, Bill Tarbox overtook him and was
there by his side.
“I brought your cap,” says Bill, “and our two
coats.”
Wade put on his cap mechanically. This little
action calmed him.
“Bill,” said he, “I 'm afraid it is a woman, — a
dear friend of mine, — a very dear friend.”
Bill, a lover, understood the tone.
“We 'll take care of her between us,” he said.
The two turned at once to the little tub of a
boat.
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Oars? Yes, — slung under the thwarts, — a
pair of short sculls, worn and split, but with work
in them still. There they hung ready, — and a
rusty boat-hook, besides.
“Find the thole-pins, Bill, while I cut a plug
for her bottom out of this broomstick,” Wade said.
This was done in a moment. Bill threw in the
coats.
“Now, together!”
They lifted the skiff to the gangway. Wade
jumped down on the ice and received her carefully.
They ran her along, as far as they could go, and
launched her in the sludge.
“Take the sculls, Bill. I 'll work the boat-hook
in the bow.”
Nothing more was said. They thrust out with
their crazy little craft into the thick of the ice-flood.
Bill, amidships, dug with his sculls in
among the huddled cakes. It was clumsy pulling.
Now this oar and now that would be thrown out.
He could never get a full stroke.
Wade in the bow could do better. He jammed
the blocks aside with his boat-hook. He dragged
the skiff forward. He steered through the little
open ways of water.
Sometimes they came to a broad sheet of solid
ice. Then it was “Out with her, Bill!” and they
were both out and sliding their bowl so quick over,
that they had not time to go through the rotten
surface. This was drowning business; but neither
could be spared to drown yet.
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In the leads of clear water, the oarsman got
brave pulls and sent the boat on mightily. Then
again in the thick porridge of brash ice they lost
headway, or were baffled and stopped among the
cakes. Slow work, slow and painful; and for many
minutes they seemed to gain nothing upon the
steady flow of the merciless current.
A frail craft for such a voyage, this queer little
half-pumpkin! A frail and leaky shell. She bent
and cracked from stem to stern among the nipping
masses. Water oozed in through her dry seams.
Any moment a rougher touch or a sharper edge
might cut her through. But that was a risk they
had accepted. They did not take time to think of
it, nor to listen to the crunching and crackling
of the hungry ice around. They urged straight
on, steadily, eagerly, coolly, spending and saving
strength.
Not one moment to lose! The shattering of
broad sheets of ice around them was a warning of
what might happen to the frail support of their
chase. One thrust of the boat-hook sometimes
cleft a cake that to the eye seemed stout enough
to bear a heavier weight than a woman's.
Not one moment to spare! The dark figure,
now drifted far below the hemlocks of the Point,
no longer stirred. It seemed to have sunk upon
the ice and to be resting there weary and helpless,
one one side a wide way of lurid water, on the
other half a mile of moving desolation.
Far to go, and no time to waste!
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“Give way, Bill! Give way!”
“Ay, ay!”
Both spoke in low tones, hardly louder than the
whisper of the ice around them.
By this time hundreds from the Foundry and the
village were swarming upon the wharf and the
steamboat.
“A hundred tar-barrels would n't git up my
steam in time to do any good,” says Cap'n Ambuster.
“If them two in my skiff don't overhaul
the man, he 's gone.”
“You 're sure it 's a man?” says Smith Wheelwright.
“Take a squint through my glass. I 'm dreffully
afeard it 's a gal; but suthin' 's got into my eye,
so I can't see.”
Suthin' had got into the old fellow's eye, —
suthin' saline and acrid, — namely, a tear.
“It 's a woman,” says Wheelwright, — and
suthin' of the same kind blinded him also.
Almost sunset now. But the air was suddenly
filled with perplexing snow-dust from a heavy
squall. A white curtain dropped between the
anxious watchers on the wharf and the boatmen.
The same white curtain hid the dark floating object
from its pursuers. There was nothing in sight
to steer by, now.
Wade steered by his last glimpse, — by the current, —
by the rush of the roaring wind, — by instinct.
How merciful that in such a moment a man is
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spared the agony of thought! His agony goes
into action, intense as life.
It was bitterly cold. A swash of ice-water filled
the bottom of the skiff. She was low enough down
without that. They could not stop to bail, and the
miniature icebergs they passed began to look significantly
over the gunwale. Which would come
to the point of foundering first, the boat or the
little floe it aimed for?
Bitterly cold! The snow hardly melted upon
Tarbox's bare hands. His fingers stiffened to the
oars; but there was life in them still, and still he
did his work, and never turned to see how the
steersman was doing his.
A flight of crows came sailing with the snowsquall.
They alighted all about on the hummocks,
and curiously watched the two men battling to save
life. One black impish bird, more malignant or
more sympathetic than his fellows, ventured to
poise on the skiff's stern!
Bill hissed off this third passenger. The crow
rose on its toes, let the boat slide away from under
him, and followed croaking dismal good wishes.
The last sunbeams were now cutting in everywhere.
The thick snow-flurry was like a luminous
cloud. Suddenly it drew aside.
The industrious skiff had steered so well and
made such headway, that there, a hundred yards
away, safe still, not gone, thank God! was the woman
they sought.
A dusky mass flung together on a waning rood
of ice, — Wade could see nothing more.
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Weary or benumbed, or sick with pure forlornness
and despair, she had drooped down and
showed no sign of life.
The great wind shook the river. Her waning
rood of ice narrowed, foot by foot, like an unthrifty
man's heritage. Inch by inch its edges
wore away, until the little space that half sustained
the dark heap was no bigger than a coffin-lid.
Help, now! — now, men, if you are to save!
Thrust, Richard Wade, with your boat-hook! Pull,
Bill, till your oars snap! Out with your last frenzies
of vigor! For the little raft of ice, even that
has crumbled beneath its burden, and she sinks, —
sinks, with succor close at hand!
Sinks! No, — she rises and floats again.
She clasps something that holds her head just
above water. But the unmannerly ice has buffeted
her hat off. The fragments toss it about, — that
pretty Amazonian hat, with its alert feather, all
drooping and draggled. Her fair hair and pure
forehead are uncovered for an astonished sunbeam
to alight upon.
“It is my love, my life, Bill! Give way, once
more!”
“Way enough! Steady! Sit where you are,
Bill, and trim boat, while I lift her out. We cannot
risk capsizing.”
He raised her carefully, tenderly, with his strong
arms.
A bit of wood had buoyed her up for that last
moment. It was a broken oar with a deep fresh
gash in it.
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Wade knew his mark, — the cut of his own
skate-iron. This busy oar was still resolved to
play its part in the drama.
The round little skiff just bore the third person
without sinking.
Wade laid Mary Damer against the thwart. She
would not let go her buoy. He unclasped her
stiffened hands. This friendly touch found its way
to her heart. She opened her eyes and knew him.
“The ice shall not carry off her hat to frighten
some mother, down stream,” says Bill Tarbox,
catching it.
All these proceedings Cap'n Ambuster's spy-glass
announced to Dunderbunk.
“They 're h'istin' her up. They 've slumped
her into the skiff. They 're puttin' for shore.
Hooray!”
Pity a spy-glass cannot shoot cheers a mile and
a half!
Perry Purtett instantly led a stampede of half
Dunderbunk along the railroad-track to learn who
it was and all about it.
All about it was, that Miss Damer was safe, and
not dangerously frozen, — and that Wade and Tarbox
had carried her up the hill to her mother at
Peter Skerrett's.
Missing the heroes in chief, Dunderbunk made a
hero of Cap'n Ambuster's skiff. It was transported
back on the shoulders of the crowd in triumphal
procession. Perry Purtett carried round the hat
for a contribution to new paint it, new rib it, new
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gunwale it, give it new sculls and a new boat-hook,—
indeed, to make a new vessel of the brave little
bowl.
“I 'm afeard,” says Cap'n Ambuster, “that,
when I git a harnsome new skiff, I shall want a
harnsome new steamboat, and then the boat will go
to cruisin' round for a harnsome new Cap'n.”
And now for the end of this story.
Healthy love-stories always end in happy marriages.
So ends this story, begun as to its love portion
by the little romance of a tumble, and continued
by the bigger romance of a rescue.
Of course there were incidents enough to fill a
volume, obstacles enough to fill a volume, and development
of character enough to fill a tome thick
as “Webster's Unabridged,” before the happy end
of the beginning of the Wade-Damer joint history.
But we can safely take for granted that, the lover
being true and manly, and the lady true and womanly,
and both possessed of the high moral qualities
necessary to artistic skating, they will go on
understanding each other better, until they are as
one as two can be.
Masculine reader, attend to the moral of this
tale: —
Skate well, be a hero, bravely deserve the fair,
prove your deserts by your deeds, find your “perfect
woman nobly planned to warm, to comfort, and
command,” catch her when found, and you are
Blest.
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Reader of the gentler sex, likewise attend:—
All the essential blessings of life accompany a
true heart and a good complexion. Skate vigorously;
then your heart will beat true, your cheeks
will bloom, your appointed lover will see your beautiful
soul shining through your beautiful face, he
will tell you so, and after sufficient circumlocution
he will Pop, you will accept, and your lives will
glide sweetly as skating on virgin ice to silver
music.
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Winthrop, Theodore, 1828-1861 [1863], Life in the open air, and other papers (Ticknor and Fields, Boston) [word count] [eaf754T].
