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"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.
"Hurrah!" cries Wade, halting in front of the men, who, some on the Foundry wharf, some on the deck of our first acquaintance at Dunderbunk, the tug "L Ambuster," were putting on their skates or watching him, "Hurrah! the skates are perfection! Are you ready, Bill?" "Yes," says Tarbox, whizzing off rings, as exact as Giotto's autograph.
He beheld a three-legged stool, a hacked desk, an inky steel-pen, an inkless inkstand; but no Cap'n Ambuster. Perry inspected the Cap'n's state-room. There was a cracked looking-glass, into which he looked; a hair-brush suspended by the glass, which he used; a lair of blankets in a berth, which he had no present use for; and a smell of musty boots, which nobody with a nose could help smelling.
"Run down, Perry," said Wade, "to the 'Ambuster, and ask Captain Isaac to step up here a moment. Tell him I have some freight to send by him." Perry moved through the Foundry with his usual jaunty step, left his dignity at the door, and ran off to the dock. The weather had grown fitful. Heavy clouds whirled over, trailing snow-flurries.
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.
And, for a quarter of an hour, he dodged the merry crowd, until at last, breathless, he let himself be touched by pretty Belle Purtett, rosiest of all the Dunderbunk bevy of rosy maidens on the ice. "He rayther beats Bosting," says Captain Isaac Ambuster to Smith Wheelwright. "It's so cold there that they can skate all the year round; but he beats them, all the same."
Still no Captain Ambuster, nor any of his crew. Search in the unsavory kitchen revealed no cook, coiled up in a corner, suffering nightmares for the last greasy dinner he had brewed in his frying-pan. There were no deck hands bundled into their bunks. Perry rapped on the chain-box and inquired if anybody was within, and nobody answering, he had to ventriloquize a negative.
Nothing, I can see, looks alive, except that queer little steamboat coming in, the 'I. Ambuster, jolly name for a boat!" Wade left his traps at the station, and walked through the village. All the gilding of a golden sunset of June could not make it anything but commonplace. It would be forlorn on a gray day, and utterly dismal in a storm.
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 hunderd tar-barrels wouldn'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.
Even oily and begrimed, Bill could be recognized as a favored lover. He looked more a man than ever before. "I forgot to mention," says the foreman, "that Cap'n Ambuster was in, this morning, to see you. He says, that, if the river's clear enough for him to get away from our dock, he'll go down to the City to-morrow, and offers to take freight cheap.
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