"Ah,s'y!"he exclaimed in the teeth of the menacing hordes."Stand back,carn't yer?I'll bash yer face in,Johnny.Whose boat is this?"Shall it be whispered that I regretted his belligerency?Here,in truth,was the drama staged,--my drama,had I only been able to realize it.The good ship beached,the headhunters hemming us in on all sides,the scene prepared for one of those struggles against frightful odds which I had so graphically related as an essential part of our adventures.
"Let's roll the cuss in the fancy collar,"proposed one of the head-hunters,--meaning me.
"I'll stove yer slats if yer touch him,"said Grits,and then resorted to appeal."I s'y,carn't yer stand back and let a chap 'ave a charnst?"The head-hunters only jeered.And what shall be said of the Captain in this moment of peril?Shall it be told that his heart was beating wildly?--bumping were a better word.He was trying to remember that he was the Captain.Otherwise,he must admit with shame that he,too,should have fled.So much for romance when the test comes.Will he remain to fall fighting for his ship?Like Horatius,he glanced up at the hill,where,instead of the porch of the home where he would fain have been,he beheld a wisp of a girl standing alone,her hat on the back of her head,her hair flying in the wind,gazing intently down at him in his danger.The renegade crew was nowhere to be seen.There are those who demand the presence of a woman in order to be heroes....
"Give us a chance,can't you?"he cried,repeating Grits's appeal in not quite such a stentorian tone as he would have liked,while his hand trembled on the gunwale.Tom Peters,it must be acknowledged,was much more of a buccaneer when it was a question of deeds,for he planted himself in the way of the belligerent chief of the head-hunters (who spoke with a decided brogue).
"Get out of the way!"said Tom,with a little squeak in his voice.Yet there he was,and he deserves a tribute.
An unlooked-for diversion saved us from annihilation,in the shape of one who had a talent for creating them.We were bewilderingly aware of a girlish figure amongst us.
"You cowards!"she cried."You cowards!"Lithe,and fairly quivering with passion,it was Nancy who showed us how to face the head-hunters.They gave back.They would have been brave indeed if they had not retreated before such an intense little nucleus of energy and indignation!...
"Ah,give 'em a chanst,"said their chief,after a moment....He even helped to push the boat towards the water.But he did not volunteer to be one of those to man the Petrel on her maiden voyage.Nor did Logan's pond,that wild March day,greatly resemble the South Seas.
Nevertheless,my eye on Nancy,I stepped proudly aboard and seized an "oar."Grits and Tom followed,--when suddenly the Petrel sank considerably below the water-line as her builders had estimated it.Ere we fully realized this,the now friendly head-hunters had given us a shove,and we were off!The Captain,who should have been waving good-bye to his lady love from the poop,sat down abruptly,--the crew likewise;not,however,before she had heeled to the scuppers,and a half-bucket of iced water had run it.Head-hunters were mere daily episodes in Grits's existence,but water...He muttered something in cockney that sounded like a prayer....The wind was rapidly driving us toward the middle of the pond,and something cold and ticklish was seeping through the seats of our trousers.We sat like statues....
The bright scene etched itself in my memory--the bare brown slopes with which the pond was bordered,the Irish shanties,the clothes-lines with red flannel shirts snapping in the biting wind;Nancy motionless on the bank;the group behind her,silent now,impressed in spite of itself at the sight of our intrepidity.
The Petrel was sailing stern first....Would any of us,indeed,ever see home again?I thought of my father's wrath turned to sorrow because he had refused to gratify a son's natural wish and present him with a real rowboat....Out of the corners of our eyes we watched the water creeping around the gunwale,and the very muddiness of it seemed to enhance its coldness,to make the horrors of its depths more mysterious and hideous.
The voice of Grits startled us.
"O Gawd,"he was saying,"we're a-going to sink,and I carn't swim!The blarsted tar's give way back here.""Is she leaking?"I cried.
"She's a-filling up like a bath tub,"he lamented.
Slowly but perceptibly,in truth,the bow was rising,and above the whistling of the wind I could hear his chattering as she settled....
Then several things happened simultaneously:an agonized cry behind me,distant shouts from the shore,a sudden upward lunge of the bow,and the torture of being submerged,inch by inch,in the icy,yellow water.
Despite the splashing behind me,I sat as though paralyzed until I was waist deep and the boards turned under me,and then,with a spasmodic contraction of my whole being I struck out--only to find my feet on the muddy bottom.Such was the inglorious end of the good ship Petrel!For she went down,with all hands,in little more than half a fathom of water....It was not until then I realized that we had been blown clear across the pond!
Figures were running along the shore.And as Tom and I emerged dragging Grits between us,--for he might have been drowned there abjectly in the shallows,--we were met by a stout and bare-armed Irishwoman whose scanty hair,I remember,was drawn into a tight knot behind her head;and who seized us,all three,as though we were a bunch of carrots.
"Come along wid ye!"she cried.
