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He found it marked with blue spots, the result of the rough tossings in the life-boat, which had left him, too, bruised and wounded in various places and with frozen toes and fingers. "My dear Mrs. Liebling," he said, "put up with your slight discomfort. We were all dead, and we have undeservedly been granted a second life."
I held Almah in my arms, and we watched the storm by the lightning-flashes and waited for the end. But the end came not. The galley was light, broad, and buoyant as a life-boat; at the same time it was so strongly constructed that there was scarcely any twist or contortion in the sinewy fabric.
At other times the canoes were drawn ashore, but she reasoned that such a precaution would not be taken during the present excitement. That was the first part of her program to capture the entire fleet, including the life-boat.
Our ship shook from one end to the other. I thought it came from inside of us that it was a loading-port door let drop by some careless ship's man below. The ship's officer in charge of our life-boat thought so, too. He stepped to the ship's side to look down. "That one, he should be put in the brig scaring us all like that!"
Whether I, too, heard the fall and saw the life-boat manned I don't remember; but I recollect all the more clearly my mother's rushing frantically from the cabin and clasping me tenderly to her heart as her rescued child. So the drama ended happily, but there had been a terrible scene.
The next morning, therefore, we prepared to set off again in the life-boat, but first I went to pay a visit to Inchi Bouyang the Malay writer, who lived in one of the houses near, and who was too stout to venture out of his own house into a less strongly built one.
Then, after a long pause: "Will you mind if I tell you of an adventure of my own, one still most vivid in my memory? It happened near there many years ago." He picked up his shawl, pushed our chairs close to the overhanging life-boat, and continued: "I had begun my professional career, and had gone abroad to study the hospital system in Europe.
But if there's anything of value aboard her we'll have it out, eh, mister?" "Certainly," I agreed. "There is still a quantity of preserved provisions in that locker; there are the two water breakers; there is a life-buoy and that is about all. But, look here!" I continued; "if something must be turned adrift, why not get rid of that long-boat of yours, and hoist in the life-boat in her place?
We opened the window in the top side of the diligence, and lifted the ladies through it and the conductor, in the character of life-boat, bore them ashore; while the driver cursed his horses in a sullen whisper, and could with difficulty be diverted from that employment to cut the lines and save one of them from drowning.
Let these rough fellows be asked, in any storm, who volunteers for the life-boat to save some perishing souls, as poor and empty-handed as themselves, whose lives the perfection of human reason does not rate at the value of a farthing each; and that boat will be manned, as surely and as cheerfully, as if a thousand pounds were told down on the weather-beaten pier.
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