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When I brought the boat ashore, five minutes later, he was gone." "Which way did you take, then?" "I went straight after you, sir, up the waterfalls; but couldn't find any trace of you except at one spot just beside a waterfall the fourth, it was where some one had slipped a foot " "Mr. Rogers," the Captain interrupted, "we had best get back to the Espriella with all speed.
The Espriella, of course, lay head-to-tide, and the tide by this time was making strongly so strongly that I had no time to get steerage way on the little boat before it swept her close under the open porthole through which I heard Miss Belcher inviting Mr. Goodfellow to pass his plate for another dumpling.
Cox and Roebuck, to whom Miss Belcher came recommended with a letter of credit. Rogers in begging a collection of humming-birds. He had three boats idle, including a pretty little fore-and-aft schooner of thirty tons, the Espriella, which Captain Branscome had no sooner set eyes upon than he decided to be the very thing for our purpose.
Lastly, at the foot of the page, as I unwrapped it at length, came a blurred illegible signature. But what mattered the sense of it? The writing was here, and recent. No one on board the Espriella could have penned it. The island, then, was inhabited now, at this moment inhabited, and the inhabitants, whoever they might be, at this moment not far from me.
The paper, too, was of a kind unfamiliar to me; thin, foreign paper, ruled with faint lines in watermark. Certainly no one on board the Espriella owned such writing-paper or the like of it. But again, the paper could not have been long in the water, and the writing seemed to be fresh.
Accordingly we hoisted sail, and in a few minutes opened the view of the lower reach, with the Espriella swinging softly at her cables, her masts reflected on the scarcely rippled water. Miss Belcher broke into a laugh at sight of Mr. Rogers wistfully eyeing us from the deck. Dr. Beauregard echoed it, just audibly. "Well, well, ma'am; it is hard upon Mr. Rogers, did you tell me?
Ahead of us the creek narrowed, promising an anchorage almost completely landlocked and as peaceful as the soul of man could desire. Rogers and, sending him forward, shook the Espriella up in the wind, at the same time calling to Goodfellow and me to lower the main throat-halliards. "Leave go anchor!"
I may tell you, Harry, that we never went up by the waterfalls at all. It was a climb, and my half-pay leg didn't like the look of it. But, jump into your boat, boy, and pull ahead of us. You and I must do a little serious talking later on." We pulled back briskly for the Espriella and reached her just as she began to swing with the turn of the tide.
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